The return to religious transcendence while including naturalistic modernity

Religious philosophers, Christian and otherwise, like to think that special human dignity cannot be found on the basis of modern materialism, and that only the return to the transcendent values of Christianity can reinvigorate Western civilization. This is an incomplete perspective.

When the Godhood goal of evolution is understood and affirmed, then can come the reinvigoration and re-sacredness of Western civilization (and Eastern), which has no doubt been lost or degraded by irreligious modernity.

That is, it is not the return (sometimes violently) of the religiously fundamental dislike or even hatred of materialism that will reinvigorate us, it is seeing and knowing that the material world evolves to supermaterial Godhood which will bring the divine and sacred back. This is the same Godhood seen only inwardly by the great religions, which is included and transformed. Our evolution to Godhood is founded in modern materialism and philosophical naturalism while vitally adding to its formerly irreligious nature our transcendence to Godhood, shaped by evolution.

We need to include but transform the inward Soul to the outward activating Spirit-Will, which activates life to evolve to Godhood, shaped later by evolution. This is the Twofold Path.

Nature calls us to this sacred mission to evolve to Godhood. To reinvigorate the West, and indeed to save the West, this religious philosophy needs to be more widely known and promoted, which is no small task. 

The rapprochement of the traditional and the modern in the West

How do we make sacred our modern, non-sacred, moral and aesthetic values without losing our extraordinarily successful technological and economic development? How can we keep an anthropocentric culture working within a theocentric culture? By affirming that the material world evolves to Godhood, that is how. The Inward God is a mirror of Outward Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution.

Modernism and traditionalism need not reject one another as they have done, we can have a transformation of the sacred, not a rejection, the inward God first seen in the great religions is realized in outward Godhood, bringing the new into the old. The great division between the spiritual and the temporal does not exist when the spiritual is seen as supermaterial. Science can join religion.

The West can lead the way in this because we have for centuries been bringing Biblical faith together with Greek philosophical inquiry, along with the Roman heritage, whereas the East has been religious traditionally without this sort of Western tension, at least until the few short decades of Marxist totalitarianism, and even that has a nondemocratic Asian ethos to it. We can now add a third stage in the development of Christianity, from Neoplatonism to Catholic Scholasticism to the theological materialism of the Evolutionary Christian Church.

The present attacks on the West by the trendy followers of the Traditionalist School (ie. Guénon and Evola), led by French and Russian intellectuals, goes against this rapprochement of tradition and the modern world. Many western intellectuals in this movement are in effect supporting the East over the West. Yes, the West has problems, with big enemies from within and without, yes, southern Russian was probably the home of Indo Europeans, but it is Western culture that evolved the great developments of science and evolution. Modernism in search of theology can find it in the rebirth of religion grounded in our sacred evolution to Godhood.

In the hierarchy of virtues the Inward Path leads to the Outward Path

The base of virtues in the Evolutionary Outward Path is the realization of the Spirit-Will within which activates material life, shaped by evolution. This leads to the realization of Godhood as the end-goal of the materially-activating Spirit-Will. All derives from this base of virtues.

Emancipation from the self and material desires to arrive at the kingdom of God within is the base of virtues in the Involutionary Inward Path seen in the great religions. Arriving at the God Within from the Inward Path one may see that this is “only” a mirror, a bright symbol of real Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution in the cosmos by way of the Outward Path.

This is not a duality, not a dual base for virtues, the Inward Path leads to the Outward Path. This is not so much a transvaluation of values as it is a hierarchy of virtues, which keeps this religious philosophy more conservative than radical.

Changing the corrupt big business imperialism of globalization is just beginning to happen

Big business imperialism is a better way to define globalization, the free movement of goods, people and capital has been directed by capital for the virtually exclusive advantage (at least in the short term) of very few stateless people.

The push back is just beginning to happen as people have lost their jobs, their identities, and even their countries supposedly for the privilege of buying cheaper goods, which they can't afford because they lost their jobs under globalization.

A new (yet traditional) kind of politician, or statesman, will be rising to promote economic nationalism, bringing the power back to the regions, back to the small states, and protecting the small states will be the central task of government. Big business imperialism will fight back against this necessary change, and it probably won't be pretty.

Will this return to regions and small states bring competitive wars between nations? The world knows how to manage with some sort of light federalism, keeping harmony between constituent units. In any case, there is nothing else to do, big business imperialism will kill us if we don't return to basics, in harmony with real human nature.

We can then---with independent varieties of people and small states in the world---get on with the important mission of figuring out how to evolve to Godhood in the cosmos, which is the true sacred mission of mankind.

The evolutionary religious defense of Godhood is better than Nietzsche's presocratic solution

Early Nietzsche celebrated pre-Socratic philosophy, he believed Hellenic culture was already in decline by the time of Socrates, he preferred the pre-Socratics. But that was the way backward. What we need is a post-scientific philosophy of evolutionary religion. Evolutionary religion can be better for us than Nietzsche's call for a new tragic art as the “saving sorceress.” Other than a few anachronistic fundamentalists, the modern world has lost religion, which has brought a lost morality, a lost worldview, along with unchecked hedonism. People need a religious yet scientific way to see through our complicated and sometimes terrible modern existence.

The Outward Path can be seen as a masculine account of the origin of our heroic struggle as we evolve to Godhood, the Inward Path can remain the more feminine ascetic path to the God Within. This is the Twofold Path which joins the past and future. The Inward Path is the Fall, the Outward Path is the Rise. This religious philosophy can bring meaning, beauty, glory, and morality back to real material existence. This is a believable theodicy, a moral defense of Godhood and the evolutionary struggles of the world which is better than  Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" solution. This is a religious philosophy better than a new pre-Socratic art and myth which early Nietzsche advocated as the way to save his God-is-dead worldview. Real and sacred art can rise from the evolutionary religious impulse, which is a universal impulse.

The sacred evolution to Godhood seen in the Theoeolutionary Church turns our gaze away from the absurd modern world without attacking or blocking material life, as the great religions tended to do. The material world is transformed into the super-material world as we evolve to Godhood. This is the Godhood that was first seen inwardly as the Father Within by the great religions, which can be retained and not thrown out.  The new fits in with the old in a Revitalized Conservatism and Ordered Evolution.

Humaneness or compassion is not indulgence regarding gays, feminists and relativism

I don't enjoy the consequences that come from disturbing the cultural zeitgeist, but the sociobiology argument against our fast-moving popular culture needs to be made again.

E. O. Wilson, perhaps the greatest living scientist, said that “genes hold culture on a leash...Cultural evolution is Lamarkian and very fast, whereas biological evolution is Darwinian and usually very slow...Biological evolution is quickly outrun by cultural change.”

Modern culture is hypertrophied hunter-gatherer culture, we have the same human nature we had in hunter-gatherer times. Inherited patterns of behavior, customs, beliefs handed down define tradition, and traditionalism is related to real human nature. The broad overlap of decisions taken by all individuals with a convergence strong enough to be labeled “human nature” tends to affirm traditionalism. And human nature and traditionalism have never accepted the gay life style, feminism or relativism. The gay life style, feminism and relativism have been outrunning the biological basis of social behavior and will eventually bump up against traditional genes holding culture on a leash, although there is some genetic connection with these life styles.

So what will happen? The genes that hold culture on a leash may snap back in a radical way, this has happened throughout human history. The Chinese, who have been gradually overtaking the West, have no open gays, feminists or relativists in their military. For example, if the elite SEAL defensive force which protects America was forced to abandon its strict meritocracy and accept gays and feminists in their elite fighting unit, and if this would happen as it seems to be happening across the military ranks, the real enemies of our country could before too long destroy or take over our country. The pop cultural indulgence of gays, feminists and relativism would have been tried and failed, with tragic results. High technology does not change human nature. Permanent peace, the dream of idealists, where no military is necessary, is simply unrealistic.

Politically correct pop culture does not seem to understand that humaneness or compassion for others is not indulgence, humaneness is not gratifying every desire that is culturally trending. True humaneness is saving human beings and the country from being overrun by a degenerate and destructive culture, which has almost diabolically presented itself as humane and compassionate, with powerful help from the corrupt media. We need not go into private homes and police the behavior there, but private morality is surpassed by public morality in rising and lasting civilizations.

Transforming the Sacred

It is deeper to center on the universal Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within material life than to center on the universal mythical themes seen in all cultures, as Jung, Eliade and Campbell discovered. The Spirit-Will activating material life is the sacred link between cultures, which is shaped by evolution.

Beneath all the “isms” of politics, as Eliade pointed out, are age old eschatological motifs or myths, but beneath these motifs are the sociobiological drives of life, and the zenith of success with these drives is evolving to actual Godhood. The nostalgia for paradise of many myths exists in the real material hope of eternal representation in survival and reproduction.

Can this goal and religion ever be more than a set of symbols, a dream? The goal sets the patterns and when the goal is evolving to Godhood in real time it takes almost endless time to attain the goal. But the distant goal does not make it less desirable, inauthentic, less motivational or less true. The goal exists at the real origin of life and religion.

The evolution to Godhood can be enacted symbolically in sacred rituals which bond the sacred goal, not as an escape from life but as a supreme affirmation of life. This is culture-creation at its root, the sacred and profane joined in revitalized religion. And this is not a “primordial return," it is a future, sacred, evolutionary goal grounded in material and supermaterial life.

The inauguration of religion is like a new creation of the world more than it is like the mythical inauguration and beginning of a new king. It is a recreation of the sacred, a transforming of the sacred which has happened continually throughout human history when it was needed.

Science in search of theology and theology in search of science arrive at Theoevolution

Most traditionalists believe that the problems of the West began in post-medieval times when we changed from a theocentric to a anthropocentric world. But what we require is a theoevolutionary world which combines the anthropocentric world evolving to the theocentric world as the right balance.

The theocentric world is incomplete without the the anthropocentric world and vice versa because it is the anthropocentric world that evolves to the theocentric world, we can't have one without the other. It is not the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of man, it is the kingdom of Godmanhood we seek, it is Christian humanism transformed into Christian Godmanhood. The sacred connection between the two worlds is contained in the Spirit-Will which activates all life toward attaining Godhood, shaped by natural evolution.

This theoevolutionary orientation can give form to healthier patterns of social and cultural life, with an Ordered Evolution which necessarily retains theo and anthro in balance, they both require each other. The old synthesis between Greek philosophy (including Roman culture) and Biblical faith eventually led to the scientific anthropocentric worldview of the Enlightenment and the decline of Biblical faith, although people like St Thomas Aquinas made valiant attempts to save religion by synthesizing Aristotle.

This assumes that there is no duality between the spiritual and the material because the material evolves to the supermaterial, formerly known as the spiritual. This brings religion and science together at last. The idea of “progress” can enter the traditional world where it was formerly banned, and we can retain the Enlightenment view of the advancement of mankind. Science without religion creates moral decline, religion without science creates moral stagnation. Science in search of theology and theology in search of science finally arrive at Theoevolution.

It's The Media

The “toxic air” against Christianity, the “self-absorption” of our culture did not come out of nowhere, it was created by the media. But the media does not blame itself, it gives us facts about the decline of Christianity, such as 91% of baby-boomers identified themselves as Christian,  now this identification is down to 77%, or the fact that 20% of young Americas now claim no religious affiliation. It was the popular and academic media that created this change. The media began this destruction carefully in the 1950's and slowly gathered power until at this time it shows utter disrespect and hostility to Christianity and religion on a daily and hourly basis.

There are some very serious weaknesses in religious philosophy, such as the dislike and blocking of natural material life, and the foolish attitude toward science, which I constantly address in this blog, but it is the popular and academic media, movies, television, music, books and not these philosophical weaknesses that are destroying Christianity and religion.

What to do about It? We have to stop letting the destroyers of public morality hide behind private free speech doctrines which were never designed to allow such rot and destruction. Too-clever lawyers with no moral compass or with destructive ulterior motives need to be stopped. We need to elect representatives who will make cleaning up the media a top priority. We need to outlaw media monopolies, which are not allowed in our Constitution anyway. This could lead to local media, more local control. America was not designed to have media powerhouses ruling our culture, which have now become imperial international powerhouses.

Will it be easy to stop them? No. Fighting cancerous malignancy is not easy, but it will kill us if we don't.

Working with what we have

Traditions matter and are often times wiser than elites (which affirms Burke and is contrary to Leo Strauss), and this suggests that changes work best with an ordered evolution. I believe in working with what we have, since I also believe we will never have perfection. That being acknowledged and affirmed, I would probably prefer to have a meritocratically selected elite of sociobiologists govern the country.

However, I agree with Raymond Cattell that if we are working within a democracy we can modify the disadvantages of democracies---such as the tendency for the have-nots to rob the haves, and the ill-informed to judge rather than a selected elite---by having selected elites help to achieve what the majority votes for and wants. I think we need to do as China is doing right now, and begin to genetically enhance our health, energy, intelligence and emotional maturity.  Everyone wants these things, right? Sociobiologists would affirm this as a high value, at least the honest and courageous ones would.

The United States actually is more undemocratic than most people think, as Fareed Zakaria pointed out, with a Constitution and Bill of Rights that expressly limit the power of government, an unelected Supreme Court, and a Senate that is one of the two least representative upper legislature bodies in the world. “All men are created equal” really needs to be seen as “equal before the law,” and equal in the Spirit-Will activating the life within all of us. There is no equality on the various dimensions of biology, culture, and genetic potential before birth, if contributions to society is the arbitrator.  We all can soon accept this reality, can we not?

The Saint and Hero of the Twofold Path

Buddha was the most courageously honest of the founders of religion in admitting that the core of his religion was that suffering is caused by attachment to material desires and the removal of attachments will end the suffering. The other revealed religions either disguised this as esoteric truth for a few or they intellectually complicated this concept. This simple idea is behind the basic attitude toward the material world of all the great religions. The bliss of becoming completely free from material attachments is defined as the God Within or the Father Within in other religions. This is the basis for ecumenism between the religions.

This is described as the Involutionary Inward Path in the Theoevolutionary Church, and it can be a hedonistic back-out from responsibility for evolving life if it is the only purpose of religion, and if it leaves out the Evolutionary Outward Path to Godhood reached through material evolution. The Inward Path can lead to the Soul-Bliss of no-suffering identified with God but this is “only” a mirror of what Godhood will be like at the zenith of evolution, and this Soul-Bliss should be seen and applied as such. The Inward Path requires the ascetics of the elimination of material drives which is the path of the saint. The Outward Path requires all the sufferings and joys of material life refined in Ordered Evolution and is the path of the hero. Both paths are affirmed in the Twofold Path of the Theoevolutionary Church.

Saving Capitalism

When we see rapacious “financiers” take over companies, steal their assets, and then sell them off with no care for workers or communities, claiming that the companies weren't run well---when we all know it's really a selfish fight over who gets the cash---it is then that we at first might think of trashing capitalism and the free enterprise system. But our better Burkian selves usually realize that no system is perfect and we need to reform the capitalism which once brought us the highest standard of living in human history.

Rana Foroohar of Time magazine rightly suggests that we need not only corporate pay and tax reform but a more German-style stakeholder capitalism that spreads the benefits of a company's growth more evenly among labor, management and shareholders. But I believe we need much deeper changes and a return to basics.

The people at “Economy In Crisis”remind us that we cannot manage our nation for our own benefit as long as we are committed to disastrous “free trade” agreements which allow foreign countries to decide our economy and our lives. These so-called “free trade” agreements have brought our country from a productive, independent, debt-free country to one that is unproductive and heavily indebted. Floods of imports have destroyed our domestic manufacturing base, and our jobs have been shipped overseas, and only the same rapacious financiers benefit from this destruction.  Is this not criminal?

World trade agreements have usurped our Constitution and we need to get out of these agreements sooner then later so that we can restore America's economic strength. No strong political leaders or statesman are in sight who advocate this kind of life-saving economic nationalism, but we hope they will soon rise.

Cultural origins beyond sociobiology

Each generation, each era, makes better intuitive and scientific guesses at explaining the purpose in life and our reason for being here, with occasional backward lapses. We have seen that material life has evolved from the frog to man, and it seems that life can continue to evolve from man to superman, and eventually to Godhood, enhanced or blocked by culture or the environment.

Nature employs myths, religion, art to help us survive better, as sociobiology explains, to seduce man into helping nature survive. I think these worldviews are more than guesses at why we are here for the sake of curiosity, and more than devices for calming the terrors and insecurities of life, which they also do.

One of the greatest contributions of Aristotle was the idea that motion is caused by incomplete entities striving for completion and perfection. This helps reaffirm the root definition of the activating Spirit-Will with the Spirit-Will activating material life toward Godhood from within while being shaped by evolution from without.

I see evolution moving inevitably in a pattern, even though it has its random elements, and the pattern has a discernible direction, in spite of instances of stagnation and retreat, toward “higher and higher more effective living forms,” as Cattell put it. The goal of evolving to Godhood need not deprive us of either science or religion. This end goal is still viewed as a fiction by science, but such scientists as Francis Heylighen are beginning to show through science how evolution tends to produce more complex systems, gradually adding more levels to the hierarchy.

There is more to life than sociobiology has so far explained, culture can be seen as more than illusions to help life survive, there is an activation of material life by the indwelling Spirit-Will within life to drive life toward the goal of evolving to Godhood, which is the deepest place where authentic myths, religion and art come from.

Postmodernism blocks biology

Postmodernism goes wrong when it thinks we can be free from the “bondage” and "terror" of history, or that we can create meta-narratives minus the bondage of history.

If there is a “bondage,” which is certainly a pessimistic idea, it is biological. We cannot escape the “bonds” of biology. Why would we want to try?!

I suspect a cowardice (or deception) among intellectuals as a consequence of the violent totalitarianism of Marxism and Fascism, which led to their denial of any bonds to any narrative, religious or political. But cowardice and deception do not make good philosophy. Biology cannot and should not be left out of our views of history.

What needs to be done is to create/develop/adapt meta-narratives, myths, or religions that harmonize with biologically founded history. This tends to affirm the Burkian importance of traditions. We also need to affirm the biological origin of social behavior, not merely cultural origins, as explained by the science of sociobiology.

The Twofold Path and theological materialism of the Evolutionary Christian Church affirms biology as well as culture in that we attain Godhood by way of material and supermaterial evolution---this is the Godhood that was first seen inwardly, but partially, in the great religions, which bonds us to the past and the future.

Resacralizing the world: Bringing the kingdom of God and man together in modernity

Western secular life may have replaced the kingdom of God with the kingdom of man but both sides in general defined the other side as evil. Both essentially rejected one another.

Resacralizing the world affirms that the kingdom of man evolves to the kingdom of God, or to Godhood. This is the real connection between the two worlds. Neither side is evil.

The way is not to go back exclusively to the traditional theocentric world which essentially rejected the kingdom of man, and the way is not to only affirm the kingdom of man and reject the kingdom of God.

This is the religious as well as realistic orientation toward the transcendent which can help create the social, political and artistic forms in the future. Ethical virtues will be cultivated around our evolution to Godhood. To change Aristotle: the proper operation of man is to evolve and not merely to understand.

Returning the usurped power to the states and the people

In a recent Modern Age article Ralph Rossum reiterated that the American Constitution established a limited government by separating and dividing the powers of government. The Constitutional limits on government are legal by way of the Constitution, this is not just a political limitation. The rule of law depends on adherence to the original intent of the Constitution, if judges are making law rather than interpreting the original content of the law, then the rule of law is not enduring.

Liberal advocates have abandoned these original-intent purposes of the Constitution and replaced them with the idea that the primary purpose of government is not to provide for limited government but to protect rights, and even to increase the powers of the government to grant greater protection for more and more rights, and furthermore to say that the Supreme Court can decide these rights.

We need to return the power usurped by the Judiciary and the federal government to the states and the people---this is the task of Congress. If we can do this then we can once again know that the main task of government is to protect the states and the private sector, government is a servant of the people and needs to be taken out of the way of the people.

With this in mind we can see the sense in such things as cutting the top marginal tax rates which has been proven to vastly increase federal revenue. But before we celebrate this windfall we need to understand that we do not increase the size of government with the extra revenues, we need to have both deficit cuts to our massive government along with tax cuts.

However, I must say, which might seem contrary, that spending some of the revenue money on powerful sociobiological research centers should be the action of future government grants---human survival and our eventual evolution to Godhood might depend on this wise action.

Similar religious ethics, different sacred goals

The ethics of the Evolutionary Christian Church resemble the values of the great religions, with a different understanding of the sacred goal. This includes traditional ethics which reflected what worked best for human nature in survival and reproductive success over time. For example, such things as loyalty in marriage, kin and group-centeredness, hierarchies, incest taboo, gender differences with room for modern cultural-technological changes, and so on, and these things were bonded by religious rituals.

The sacred goal has been transformed in the ECC from the inward to the outward Godhood while still retaining the inward Father Within as a mirror of the Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution. The Twofold Path and theological materialism transform the goal and the myth.

Violent idealism is not welcome in this mission. Meritocracy is a solid preference. As Raymond Cattell pointed out, we begin with equal opportunity for all knowing that different genetic and cultural makeups will alter the end results. The principle of neighborliness in society can help those with intellectual and physical incapacitates without slowing the gifted down, as too often happens now.  Intelligence is needed for our complicated problems now more than ever.

We are proceeding in our evolution to Godhood on general scientific principles but also from religious intellectual intuition.  With the progress of education in sociobiology, majorities in democracies will want to pursue the supreme survival and religious success of evolving to Godhood, by continually enhancing health, energy, intelligence, emotional maturity, and beauty. Our mission will be to help this heroic evolution along even though we cannot know the complete future. 

Rescuing the Material World in the Twofold Path

What has not been sufficiently understood is that all the vows of poverty, the disparagement of material things, the hatred of material desires, and all the public morality that was created around this rejection of material things, was originally the development of esoteric mystics seeking the God Within, the Father Within, exclusively, by ridding the body of all material desires so that they might see the Father Within. This was the Involutionary Inward Path of the great religions.

The general population, and some theologians, have taken these strictures against materialism to be against materialism mainly for the sake of social well being, with little or no understanding of the original goal or purpose for the strictures against materialism. "Heaven" for the mystics was not a distant golden mansion in the sky, heaven was the blissful experience of the Father Within.

In the Twofold Path it is the Evolutionary Outward Path of material evolution to Godhood which rescues or rearranges materialism away from its exclusive disparagement by the mystics of the Involutionary Inward Path. The God seen inwardly is only a mirror of the Godhood reached outwardly by material evolution. However, we do not make an evil of the Father Within of the Inward Path, as the mystics made an evil of the material Outward Path. We require the material world to attain Godhood by way of evolution, and the Father Within can be seen as the first glimpse pointing the way toward evolving to Godhood in the cosmos. This lends itself to the wise conservative path of change and Ordered Evolution, which almost always works better than radical change.  The new includes and transforms the old.

The Great Mission

Of course it sounds like grandiose delusions or inflation to say so, but to look into the abyss and see that the God defined in the past is not there, or is there only inwardly in the human mind, leaving humanity without solace in the cosmos, this calls forth a remedy, the healing balm of religion and art, which Nietzsche saw as the deepest origin of ancient culture. That is, revitalized religion, bringing God back redefined as Godhood reached by way of material evolution.

This is the new myth-religion-art brought forward by nature itself through human beings, to help make sense of existence, to make existence bearable, to help man reach the goal of nature itself, which is to evolve to Godhood.  This turns our gaze away from the horrible to the sublime as ancient religions once did.

This myth-religion-art is desperately needed once again, and no less than this is the mission and task of the religious philosophy of the Evolutionary Christian Church.

Human nature and human culture should not be mutilated by grafting the incongruous Inward Path of mystic religions on the deeper and far stronger Outward Path of material evolution, like a superficial veneer over a natural oak. We need to go back, but religiously, to our neglected deeper roots and give the material world a better chance to evolve to Godhood.

We do this not by rejecting the Inward Path to the God Within, or Father Within, which is a mirror or virtual glimpse of real Godhood evolved to in the cosmos in the Outward Path. Human nature and conservative human history tell us that we need Ordered Evolution not radical revolution.

In the Twofold Path the Inward Path is synthesized and fulfilled in the Outward Path which can heal us and create religious, psychological and cultural wholeness. Biology, science, art and social philosophy can legitimately join religion.

Correcting Nietzsche's error

Friedrich Nietzsche began his career by writing about the “German Spirit” and how to unblock and revive it, but as time went on Nietzsche thought that we all need to transcend the national perspective and affirm only individual great men, “good Europeans,” and supermen, downplaying or blocking nationalism.

Nietzsche's rejection of nationalism was at least to a certain extent related to Wagner's imperial brand of nationalism, or Wagner's pushy personality which took up all the oxygen in a room, and perhaps also do to Nietzsche's unfamiliarity or discomfort with male authority figures, having been raised by women only. Even great minds can brilliantly rationalize to accommodate their own weaknesses.

Correcting this error would have required an affirmation of the truths behind group-selection in the evolution of the human species and human culture. Supermen need the nation as much as the nation needs them. It seems to me that Nietzsche might have welcomed new knowledge from the evolutionary science of sociobiology had he had it.

What needs to be championed is the evolution and promotion of great men and women along with their nations, many small nations, ethnostates, with mutually agreed upon natural differences and natural separations, as we all evolve toward Godhood in the cosmos, sharing knowledge and information across a variety of nations. That is a version of "internationalism" we could live with. It seems to me that this is the better version of the new religious ethos which early Nietzsche did see as necessary to revive the fallen world.  God is not dead, Godhood has been insufficiently understood.  The Inward Path to the inward God of traditional religion leads to the Outward Path of evolution to Godhood, transformed in the Twofold Path.

New clothes for old gods

The comparative mythology of Eliade and Jung thought that behind every cult or culture lurked archetypal religion. I would interpret this as the Spirit-Will and sociobiology behind every religion and culture, with the Spirit-Will activating material life toward Godhood, which is shaped by natural evolution as explained by sociobiology.

This definition of the Spirit-Will works in harmony with what we have learned of nature and human nature from evolutionary science. Survival and reproductive success, which has largely activated the creation of ethics, reaches its supreme success when Godhood is evolved to.

This is a grand agreement that ties religion with materialism in a positive way and brings science into religion legitimately. To know is more than to remember, as Plato thought. The sacred is not somewhere else or only in the past, it is here with life evolving toward supremely sacred Godhood. 

This involves both mystics and scientists. This “reduces” religion to the essentialism, universalism and particularism of the Spirit-Will and sociobiology, retaining the past in the future.

Can the decay and degeneracy be stopped?

We should not have to be fundamentalist religious fanatics to see the decay and degeneracy of America and the West:  the endless violent slaughter in movies and videos, the urinal “humor,” the sexual perversion all over the Internet, fathers and authority figures ridiculed across the media, drugs given to our children to alter their behavior, millions of babies butchered in abortion clinics, college students enslaved for life paying back college loans, when most of the jobs are outsourced overseas by modern robber barons. And the “rights” of these pornographers, violent movie-makers and robber barons are defended while all other rights are neglected.

Politically the Republication party does largely stand for greed, and the Democratic party does largely stand for social decay, consciously or unconsciously. Both parties try to police the world with trillions of dollars borrowed from China, the military-industrial-complex continues to think up more wars that kill our sons and daughters and bankrupt our nation, to make a very few men very rich.

Can this decay and degeneracy be stopped? A hard time is coming. It will require facing sociobiological truths about human nature. It will require the devolution of big governments and the revitalization of small states and regions, and the mutual separation of different peoples. It will require a a return to natural human health. It will require heroes and ordinary people. In the long term it will require the moral power of new or renewed religion.

Imperial Hypocrisy

It is hypocrisy in foreign policy when one imperialism seeks to prevent a weaker nation from becoming imperialistic like themselves, or when one imperialism threatens to take over another imperialism.

One imperialism in the hand is worth two in the bush. For example, before the United States or Israel tries to prevent Iran from imperialistic religious aggression, it should pull back from its own military-industrial-complex imperialism, and Zionist imperialism.

Seeking to extend the power or territories of one nation, religion, ideology, ethnic group, etc., over another sovereign nation is not the same as having a strong defense, second to none, against imperial threats.

“Neoconservatives” have been in charge of an imperialistic American foreign policy and they need to be detached from American foreign policy. If they do succeed in taking us to war with Iran, the one good thing to come from such a disastrous undertaking might be the ending of neoconservative influence and power.

Politicians, or statesman, will eventually rise, once again, who believe the old cliches that good military fences make good neighbors, or who believe in minding our own business. These localist cliches make sense for future foreign policy in a world of thousands of evolving small states, with regional light federalism to protect their independence. It's that simple, and that difficult.

We can evolve in a democracy

Raymond Cattell remarked that equality of opportunity, which we affirm, goes along with democracy, but we need to accept that different genetic and cultural makeups do alter opportunities later on after birth. Equality as an ideal is not true biologically. But for group survival we need to maintain equal opportunity because we do not know in a final sense what traits will help us survive more successfully and where they might come from.

The basic good idea behind democracy is to substitute the voting booth for the battlefield, on the grounds that a larger following would win the battle. The problem with democracy, which Plato wrote about, is that it can become legalized robbery of the haves by the have nots, and it substitutes judgment by uninformed multitudes for that of a selected intelligent elite.

Cattell suggests that this weakness can be modified by separating the judgment on what is wanted by the majority from judgment by democracy's elites on how to get it. All groups seem to want health, energy, intelligence, and the capacity to reach emotional maturity, and we can be reasonably sure that most groups, at least out of the glare of political correctness, would want to enhance these things. How we best get these things can be the task of an intelligent elite in a democracy. The Republican form of democracy can also help in this way, with representatives for the people chosen among the best of the community.

It is also true that different cultures have different merits, musical, scientific etc, which in some sense are heritable, and they will want to add emphasis here both culturally and genetically. The natural separation of small states in a light federalism allows for these differences. So, we can evolve in a democracy, if we think about it or apply it in this way.

On tolerant syncretism

The Evolutionary Christian Church wants to have a tolerant syncretism regarding the great religions, stemming from the Involutionary Inward Path to the God Within which they all share. What the ECC adds and synthesizes is the Evolutionary Outward Path of natural evolution to Godhood, which brings many other fields into religion, such as the science of evolution.

This way we enter the future with a religion of the past and the future. An example might be how Hinduism seems to have handled syncretism better than Christianity. The ECC brings religion full circle back even to the ancient naturalism of religion before religion soared into object-free spiritual monotheism. We affirm natural evolution to supermaterial Godhood.

This does not defy the age we live in, this includes and transforms the age. As Walter Kaufmann pointed out, the etymology of the word “religion” derives from “religare,” to tie, to bond. The meaninglessness of modern philosophy leads to futility. At their best all fields become one.

Great men and reform

I think Nietzsche swerved down the wrong path when in his later work he suggested that great men should speak only to other great men and not to the nation of philistines. The problem with individualism, libertarianism and anarchism, is that it misses or overlooks the categorical imperative of group selection in the creation of the ethics of the group and the individual.

It is understandable that a genius like Nietzsche would become embittered by the German culture which feared and ignored many of its geniuses, including himself, but great men also need to affirm the sociobiological ties that bind them to the group and to their nations.

The ruin of Western culture came from both ignorance and from those who consciously wished to destroy it so that they might rise to power over the weakened nations. Can reform spring from what is already corrupt? Nietzsche didn't think so, but does not all reform spring from corruption?

Western culture will be reformed at first by those who often do so in spite of the culture. Men of strong will prevail in their work at least, and the work later helps reform the culture. The resistance they encounter can even at times push them forward with that old “to hell with you” spirit, even if it occasionally destroys them. But the work of great men essentially benefits the group, even when they think they are speaking only to other outsiders.  To try to ignore the group is hopeless and irresponsible, over time even great men and their works cannot survive or evolve on their own without the group.

The essential and the particular in religion

I don't merely reduce all religions down to a sacred time or a sacred place, or to universal archetypes, although I affirm those things, I do "reduce" religion down to a universal sociobiology, along with the activation of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood, with the sacred goal of evolving to Godhood in natural evolution. This biological or superbiological base runs through all religions and cultures.

The “particularism” within this universalism comes by way of the variety of life, the variety of people, species, subspecies, each in their own environments, and all evolving in their own fashions. Present academic objections coming from the “postcolonial” particularism crowd to the “imperialism” of any universal perspective is simply wrong. Universal biology trumps the particular culture even though they work together in evolution. And the Spirit-Will which activates life in general is the deepest base of universalism, although science has not acknowledged it.

This all leads to an ethnopluralism of ethnostates as the most rational and instinctively true political from for a variety of humans.

Unblocking The Sacred Erg

The instinct or erg which is frustrated in our present culture is the sacred instinct of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood that activates life, which is then shaped by natural evolution. This is the instinct which most causes---usually unconsciously---our need for religion or our fascination with the mystical or supernatural. The religious/scientific and cultural task is to unblock and better understand this instinct so that we can get on with evolving to Godhood, which is the sacred goal of the instinct.

Once unblocked this sacred instinct can lead us to adapting something like Cattell's Beyondist hope of having a UNESCO type international religious/scientific center for sociobiologically informed decisions about our evolution toward Godhood, which can be applied in democratic republics or with whatever type political system there is, with a free exchange of ideas between different regions, states and nations, and with a mutual interest in maintaining their differences and variety as we evolve.

This is a religious mission with Godhood as the goal, but we are not now able to see too far into the future, so we will need the spirit of scientific discovery and adventure, grounded in religion, as we evolve toward higher intelligence and character.

Bringing back poetry and myth to religion

Unlike the older pagans, the revealed religions have said that God cannot be objectified or embodied, God is no It but only Thou. This, which both the Hindu's and Moses revealed, ended up rejecting the objectifying myths of the earlier age.

It seems true that when the poetry is taken out of religion it damages or even kills religion. I have more or less added poetry to both Christianity and to Raymond Cattell's noble religion from science, which he called Beyondism, not for the sake of saving religion, but because I have seen the unconscious intention of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood activating material life to Godhood, later shaped by natural evolution, and science has not affirmed this yet, nor do the revealed religions.

Although it defies standard interpretations, this brings back poetry and myth to religion, as we can embark upon the heroic mission of evolving from man to superman to supermaterial Godhood in the cosmos.

This religious philosophy also retains the first glimpse of Godhood seen inwardly by the Hindus and by Moses, in the Twofold Path, which allows a Revitalized Conservatism and an Ordered Evolution.