Saving Religion and Science

Without the addition of the Greek pagan philosophers (eg. by Aquinas and others) Christianity would have led to the relaxed nonmaterial life of India (precapitalism), because Christ's message, like all the traditional sages, was definitively against the material world and against the natural desires of the flesh. Such pagan virtues as courage, group justice, and loyalty made social morality possible, whereas Christian values led to ascetic monks and monasteries, as in the East, even if there were slight agreements that it is better to marry than burn of the flesh.

After the steady advance of scientific knowledge of the material world, for example, the brilliant insights into evolution, both religion and science unconsciously at least demoralized the world. There were complications from not being able to connect material and spiritual things, leaving people---both in science and religion---adrift with no solid base for morality.

Evolutionary Christianity (EC) brings material evolution into religion by defining Godhood as the Zenith of material and supermaterial evolution. The God of traditional religion is identified as the God-Within or the Spirit-Will, attained through the Involutionary Inward Path, and the God-Without is seen as the Zenith of natural and supermaterial evolution, attained through the Evolutionary Outward Path. Both Paths are retained in the Twofold Path. EC brings material evolution into religion and religion into future science---science, for example, still needs to define the supermaterial Spirit-Will that activates life. This brings the Spiritual and Material together allowing the world to be re-moralized and revitalized.

Nietzsche's death of God was greatly exaggerated

Nietzsche was on to something important when he saw Being as Will, but there was no need to kill Godhood. He could have seen the Will as the activating Spirit of traditional religion driving material evolution to supermaterial evolution and Godhood. Being becomes being becomes Being becomes being evermore in evolution. It was therefore an error to announce the death of God.

It was also not necessary to murder religion. Nietzsche could have synthesized the Will into the Holy Spirit, as the God-Within of traditional religion, and retained the natural world as that which evolves to the God seen as the Inward God or Will to Godhood.

This is what the Twofold Path does in Evolutionary Christianity.

Revitalizing The “Good”

Professor Kozinski (Modern Age, Spring 2010) and others say that education means developing the ability to reason, but then reason needs to know and achieve the “good.” What is the good? Aristotle says the good is happiness. Traditional Christians, and other religions, say this is not enough, we need God-revealed knowledge to complete ourselves so that we may see man's ultimate good.

I see “happiness” as a shorter-term goal and not the longer-term end-goal, since happiness is a process within another deeper process explained in natural science; we feel happiness when we fulfill drives which lead to our survival and reproductive success, that is the natural incentive behind happiness. So survival and reproductive success become a deeper good than happiness, yet still not the deepest goal.

Survival and reproductive success alone do not fully define the good. Tradition has said that we need religion-derived knowledge of man's ultimate goal, which “material reason” alone cannot verify. I think that the “supermaterial reason” of the Spirit can verify the ultimate goals, with intellectual intuition and faith.

In the Theoevolutionary Church the Soul is at the zenith of the material mind and contains the zenith of material reasoning. It is through the Soul that one can glimpse the supermaterial "reasoning" of the Spirit, which exists at the Zenith of the Soul. Here in the Spirit is the Will to Godhood within evolution. Here the Theoevolutionary Church revitalizes Tradition with the Twofold Path.

The Two Goods in Theoevolutionary Church derive from the Involutionary and Evolutionary Paths. The Involutionary Inward Path is the Path to the Soul and Spirit within of Traditional religion, and the Evolutionary Outward Path is the Path to God-Without, which is the Godhood we evolve to in the natural and supermaterial world.

The ultimate “good” therefore means attaining Godhood through the Evolutionary Outward Path, and this good can be seen or mirrored in the Involutionary Inward Path. This is the Twofold Path to happiness and to the Absolute Good. Education can be defined in how we learn these things.

Utopian yet not totalitarian

Evolutionary Christianity (EC) could be said to have a “utopian” goal, namely, the evolution of life to Godhood, but EC does not affirm totalitarian state power to attain its goal. This makes EC a unique synthesis of traditionalism and progression, which I call Revitalized Conservatism.

This relates to the hope in EC of the synthesis of science and religion, where we are not confined by the standard empirical model of life but see Godhood and the Spirit-Will as a supermaterial phenomenon, as objects of nature and evolution, yet to be fully defined by science.

That is, the task of government is not libertarian and not socialist, government and religion need to protect the right and freedom of all people to evolve to Godhood, while at the same time protecting evolutionary differences, as we all rise, at our own speed, to Godhood, within small states and localities, protected by a light federalism.

All have a Happy Thanksgiving

The purpose of the frustrations at the airports, and the blow-back

The globalist's don't really mind the frustrations of the searches and gropings at the airports because they think this will make the people hate the Muslim world more. A few Muslim extremist groups, whose tactics are often evil, are now about the only serious opposition to the globalist takeover of the world.

But fueling this hatred is a wrong calculation and it will have blow-back in the form of isolationism. Then the problem for the globalists will be to make the isolationists seem as evil as they made the Muslim extremists. This won't work well either because localism and nationalism harmonize well with basic human nature, and globalism does not.

People are both means and ends

Upward evolution is not evil and it defines people as both means and ends. The problems come when one people, one state, see themselves as the only noble ones, the only chosen ones, neglecting the universal activation to evolve to Godhood within all people, all states.

Contrary to Kant we should act on the maxim that all people, all races, all states are activated as means, and not merely as ends, to evolve to Godhood, and it is our mission to aid in this sacred end goal, for all. When one group declares themselves the only worthy group it usually doesn't survive for long.

People are living objects, not abstract objects, the abstract subject exist within the mind of the living object---means are as valuable as ends.

Being as being

There is no essential difference between what is known in philosophy and theology as being (lower-case) and Being (higher-case) other than the degree of the evolution of beings. The highest being-Being, or Beings, is Godhood by degree of evolution.

Being is in the mind of being and is part of being only as a definition of being. Therefore, Being does not really deserve its higher-case designation, other than to indicate the highest evolution.

Mind is that which grants being a definition, and mind exits in the object-being as less than the object itself.

This gives primacy to existence over the definition of existence, this gives primacy to the object of existence over the subject of existence. Object and subject are in any case the same, as Being is the same as being---Being exists inside being as mind. It is not the "essence" of being either.

The highest Being is inside the being of Godhood as the Mind of Godhood, therefore, we will not know Being until we evolve to Godhood and have the Mind of Godhood. All Being-beings from the lowest evolved to the highest evolved are made of substance in the world; supermaterial substance in the world evolves from material substance.

I would prefer to reverse the higher-case Being to the lowercase being because it is being which is the Supreme Object whereas what has been called Being is only the definition of being---this also is true even in the Mind of Godhood.

Not “either” earth “or” heaven, one evolves to the other

The Twofold Path in Evolutionary Christianity (EC) offers faith and hope beyond the earth, beyond the human species, as we evolve to Godhood in the Kosmos. But this faith does not discard earth or humanity, which are the only vehicles we have to evolve to Godhood beyond the earth.

Nietzsche's Zarathustra wanted men to “remain faithful to the earth,” he thought faith and humanity should not look beyond the earth, heaven was a lie, we should develop man and superman on earth. Feuerbach (one of Hegel's disciples) said that Christianity prevents humanity from realizing the Absolute. But the solution to this is not to radically throw out Christianity but to incorporate the Twofold Path of Evolutionary Christianity.

It is not either earth or heaven, or either Christianity or atheism, it is earth and Christianity as the path of evolution to Godhood. In the Involutionary Inward Path of EC the Spirit is reached within, as a sacred reference to the Godhood of the Evolutionary Outward Path. The Absolute is reached through the natural world of evolution from the material to the supermaterial in the Evolutionary Outward Path. This is the Twofold Path..

And science is still involved in EC, future science can eventually define the Spirit and Godhood in supermaterial terms.

"The day of the globalist has come and gone"

Who fed the tiger?  By Pat Buchanan 

Surrendering subject to sacred object

It takes courage to surrender the subject to the object. We prefer to think we are special, free, not a “thing.” So we try to set ourselves outside the object as a subject. This is not reality. The reality is that we are objects who think we are free subjects.

We see the great fear of philosophers in surrendering subject to object in the ways they warn us of how the communists, fascists and the Brave New World viewed humans as “merely” objects.

When we can see living objects as evolving to Godhood then objects become less cold and not removed from the sacred. Science rejects this goal as not being a part of living objects and this is mainly what makes science seem cold. But even if there was not an activating Spirit or Will to Godhood within living objects, it still seems cowardly of us to deny objects in favor of subjects.

The two ways we see ourselves, according to Roger Scruton and others, as subjects with self-conscious freedom, or as objects as part of nature's causality, are to my mind not equal ways at all. The object of causality is all there is, even if the subject can think about causality.

When the Spirit Within is included in a scientific causality activating life along the various paths of natural evolution, all the way to Godhood, then it is this which will alleviate the coldness and alienation of the object and make the object more sacred, and not something to be feared.

Avoiding the paralysis: History is not at an end

Theologians and philosophers have mainly only interpreted Godhood, the goal is to evolve to Godhood.

The “Grand Narrative” is not at all dead. The future of the world depends not on Hegel's dialectic but on Darwin's evolution reinterpreted theologically.

It is absurd to say as Fukuyama says (after Hegel) that history has reached its conclusion because we have attained liberal democracy and a market economy. The struggle is not merely for Hegel's freedom and recognition, the struggle is to evolve all the way to Godhood.

Only evolutionary thinking can avoid the paralysis of dogmatic systems in theology, philosophy and even in science. The material Spirit-Will activates evolution to Godhood, thus a Grand Narrative that combines science and theology is possible. The path is mainly undetermined in natural evolution but the goal of Godhood activated by the Spirit-Will is determined.

Godhood exists in space and time

This is the key to translating the idea of the transcendent to supermaterialism. Godhood is supermaterial and does not transcend time and space.

The Spirit-Will within man, and within all life, also exists in space and time, but It may contain the supermaterial qualities of the Godhood. The transcendental can also be thought of as an “intuition” of the higher states of the material.

The primary task of the Spirit-Will is the activate life to evolve in the natural world to Godhood, which is why the Spirit can also be called the Will To Godhood.

The meaning of “perfection” in theology does not include change, the God of theology is changeless in this way. But Evolutionary Christianity does not see change as imperfect. Change is evolutionary and Godhood is attained through evolution. Then Godhood may change as the next cosmos is born.

The Bridge

Evolutionary Christianity (EC) is bridging the barrier between empirically proved truth and transcendental belief, by defining the transcendence as supermaterial, which would be considered an hypothesis in science, but is considered true reality in EC, yet to be proved by science.

This means we don't reject transcendence as Spinoza and as the moderns did, we define transcendence as supermaterial. We evolve in the material world to Godhood in the supermaterial world.

This is not offered merely as a consolation to the loss of a timeless God, as Nietzsche's superman, this is the way to see, know and become Godhood. Our human evolution to Godhood can bring back what Roger Scruton called the community of holiness---we are all evolving to Godhood---which was lost when God was declared dead.

The Return To The First God

Bringing religion back to the material

If we see the different religions as part of one evolutionary history we might see the first-phase God as an actual object God, as a sort of superhuman. Then men began to distinguish themselves from God and see God outside themselves and not of the material world. The God of philosophers, God as Idea, could be seen or found inwardly but this was still a God separate from the material world.

Evolutionary Christianity could be thought of as returning to the first God, the Supreme Object God. This also means a return to the material world which was virtually exiled from serious religion. Godhood is seen as the apotheosis of the material world, we can conceive of ourselves as natural beings without being atheistic. We need not, like the Left Hegelians, replace God with humankind, we reinstate God as a supermaterial Godhood attained through evolution. The Inward God is retained as a symbol of God and activating the world to evolve to real Godhood in the Twofold Path.

By bringing religion back to the material and supermaterial, we can also bring religion back to science or science back to religion, which have been separated.

Upsetting the Programming

The one force that can, over time, upset the program of ignorance, or upset any Cryptocracy (esoteric manipulation of the minds of the masses), is the Will to Godhood, the Spirit-Within, which seeks to climb always toward Godhood in the natural and supermaterial world. This is God's Will and God's Divine Grace. Evolutionary Christianity appeals to this Force, this Will, this Spirit.

The Truth is both of the Mind (Soul) and of the Spirit, but it can be biased and manipulated. The Cryptocracy ultimately or esoterically attends the Involutionary Soul Within, the Zenith of the Mind, and it directly or indirectly blocks the Evolutionary Outward Path of the Spirit's activation of life to evolve to Godhood.

Evolutionary Christianity does not reject or extirpate this Inward Path as one might expect, because it is the ancient path of Traditional Religion. We synthesize the Inward Path with the Outward Path in the Twofold Path, thereby countering the religious justification for direct war, occult or otherwise.

The Philosophical Trap of Subjects and Objects

The self or subject is part of an object like all other objects, humans as objects with minds and consciousness can become conscious of the self in various degrees of consciousness, objects can become conscious of the subject or the self.

Some objects, such as lower animals, cannot become conscious of the self, whereas the highest evolved Objects can become totally conscious of the Self, which defines Godhood. Godhood must be evolved to among the various evolving objects in the cosmos. We are objects of the world and in the world.

We don't have to attain Godhood to see the subject as object, but we have to attain Godhood to see the Totality of the subject-object. Religion has almost exclusively concentrated on the human subject becoming conscious of the object, blocking out the natural evolution that makes this fully possible.

We cannot, as humans, become fully conscious of the object contrary to many spiritual gurus, until or unless be evolve all the way to Godhood, from the material to the supermaterial. We never stand outside of nature. The distinction between the sacred and profane is based on the level of evolution leading to Godhood, or the sacred, and not on the material versus the spiritual, since the spiritual is supermaterial.

The Young Hegelians

Unlike Feuerbach and the Left Hegelians, Evolutionary Christianity does not have to abolish Christianity to conceive of man as a natural being.

I apotheosize the natural being into a supermaterial being, and into Godhood, who is evolved to in the natural and supermaterial world. Godhood is seen as the Zenith of Evolution.

I don't enshrine humankind in place of Hegel's Absolute Spirit, as Feuerbach (and later Marx) tried to do, I enshrine the highest evolved natural Object, or Objects, in the cosmos, which is the Supreme Object Godhood.

This Godhood does not take the place of the "Absolute Spirit," the Spirit-Will is seen as the Second Logos in Godhood, and it is material or supermaterial.

In Hegel, as in many philosophers and theologians before him, the-idea-in-itself IS God, whereas in Evolutionary Christianity the “idea-in-itself” is “only” in the Mind of Godhood as the Third Logos, or as Soul-Mind-Body-Evolution.

The Great Spiritual Blockade against material objects ends in the positive theology of the evolution of the natural world to Godhood.

No contradiction between individualism and altruism

Ayn Rand did no see that there is no contradiction between individualism and altruism, sociobiology has proven this. Economic nationalism can rise affirmed by sociobiology, which helps define true human nature. We advance ourselves by advancing our related groups.

We need free men, free small states, free economics, but we also need a light, federal, altruistic protection of the economic states within the nation, so that the individuals within the states and nation can prosper, as we did when economic nationalism helped our nation rise to the highest standard of living in human history.

Ayn Rand's formidable intellectual courage was not formidable enough to turn her back on her life's work, her radical libertarian individualism, although she might have at the end of her heyday when sociobiology arose. Perhaps her hatred of group behavior was just too strong to overcome following Soviet communism and German fascism, which she lived through.

Godhood Is Not Death

Mysticism in most religions ends in silence, in an “imageless” God, Truth or the Absolute.

But Godhood is not imageless, not silence, not death. Godhood is the Zenith of Evolution, the Supreme Object of supermateriality.

Godhood has been confounded with the God-Within, or the Soul and Spirit, which does require a form of death to see or experience, blocking or unattaching oneself from all material desires. But this is the goal of the Involutionary Inward Path, not the goal of the Evolutionary Outward Path. These are both included in the Twofold Path of Evolutionary Christianity.

Logos is not the “idea-in-itself” of Hegel, the idea-in-itself only defines or denotes the Supreme Object Godhood.

Rescuing Art From Overthinking

Since at least Hegel's time it has been thought that philosophy transcends art because we supposedly think the Absolute whereas art “merely” expresses the Absolute in figurative form.

We need to go back to expressing the Absolute in figurative form because the Absolute is a figurative form, a Supreme Living Object.

Godhood is not merely “imageless truth,” not merely the “idea-in-itself” of Hegel, this thinking can indeed lead to the end of art. Ideas only define objects that are more important than the ideas that represent them.

Art should progress exactly the opposite of Hegel's scheme, art needs to rearrange itself from poetry back to sculpture and architecture, art needs to move away from the idea of the triumph of mind over matter, and instead move back to matter and then on to the supermateriality defined in evolved-to Godhood.

Redeeming The Material In Religion

Materialism has been barely tolerated by Religion, leaving materiality out of morality, except in a back door, contrary way of trying to deal with the devil.

What is not understood is that the rejection of materialism applies only to the Involutionary Inward Path that leads to the Soul and Spirit Within man, which all the Revealed Religion's seek. Various methods are used to see or experience the Soul and Spirit Within, which involve blocking out the senses and the material world. Religious morality derives essentially from this discipline.

But this technique does not apply to the Evolutionary Outward Path to Godhood, which is the other half of the Twofold Path in Evolutionary Christianity. In the Outward Path one reaches true and real Godhood through material evolution all the way to supermateriality. The Spirit Within contains great attributes of Godhood, since it came from Godhood, but it is not Godhood, and should not be the single goal of religion.

What Will Change?

The day after the 2010 midterm elections the question for me remains: who is going to promote economic nationalism, which will cure America of most of its ills?

The Tea Party seems controlled by the influence of the economic globalists, and both parties are a mix of a majority who support globalism and a minority who support economic nationalism. Economic nationalism built this country and made it great, as it is now building China and making China great. We need trade, but we need fair trade, not free trade.

The American people seem to be instinctive economic nationalists, but they have few national representatives, and the liberal media dislikes economic nationalism. The Democrats, backed by resurgent unions, may be more open to protecting American jobs than the Republicans, who are also controlled by the global corporations.

When their patriotism is not manipulated the people feel that we need to bring our armies home, our troops have mainly been dupes for raiding and looting global corporations. This would save us billions, and also make us better liked in the world.

As long as Americans are losing their jobs and losing their country to the globalists, I don't think this strain of economic nationalism will go away. The number of economic nationalists will grow, and they will eventually find their national spokesman, and their media. But it will not be easy.

Human Nature and Art

The various “calls to order” which brought in the various revivals of Classicism in art can be seen as attempts to ground culture in human nature. The idea that the classical calls to order happened following a period of chaos, war, etc., has also been discerned. But I prefer to think of Classicism as not so much going back to the past as going back to human nature.

Sociobiology has described how culture is on a “leash” of biology, and when culture roams too far from biological human nature it will be pulled back to human nature. For example, attempts at universal equality as in communism have little relation to human nature---human nature is kin-centered, monogamous, hierarchical, xenophobic, even ethnocentric, etc. which brings back a Revitalized Conservatism.

The Evolutionary Realism in art of the Theoevolutionary Church adds the Will to Godhood, or Tirips, which activates life to evolve to Godhood in the cosmos. This means that art need not merely copy the past in a plastic neoclassicism but revitalize the past with Ordered Evolution. Ordered Evolution affirms tradition even as it projects forward toward future evolution to Godhood. This grounds art in the affirmation of the sacred, which has defined all great works of art, which is affirmed in the Twofold Path of the Theoevolutionary Church.

Time, Numbers, Objects, and Godhood

Our task is to find ways to understand reality, not to get trapped in the endless, philosophical, Gordian Knot of whether the world is real or not. Godhood and the world are objectively real, and not merely a subjective experience.

Spinoza was right in drawing no distinction between God and the natural world, but this is valid only as long as we also see various levels of evolution in the natural world leading up to Godhood in the supermaterial world. The substance of Godhood, as yet unknown, will become known when we evolve to Godhood.

There seems to be no "timeless" realm, there is only objects moving through time. This is contrary to many philosophical interpretations of the Absolute, or religious interpretations of God. Godhood is a Supreme Object in time.

Numbers do not exist as objects, but this does not make numbers a timeless God, numbers are merely descriptions of objects and nothing more. Numbers do not deserve equal status with the objects they represent.