How an hypertrophied unworkable form of altruism doesn’t doom religion or altruism

Altruism was created largely from competing with outside groups which required altruism within groups to be successful against other groups who may have been less altruistic within their group, and so altruistic genes survived---and group selection remains the central unit of selection, as E.O.Wilson has recently affirmed. Then Christianity and other religions (including Marxism) called for altruism toward everyone, in-group and out-group, which inadvertently destroyed the very dynamic and origin of of altruism. This helps explain why two thousand years of Christian altruism toward all has not stopped wars, altruism-for-all destroyed the very altruism required to take social action in a group. But competition between church groups didn't cease, the competition even helped bond altruism within the group.

So, what if your tradition is based on a lie or on ignorance, do you chuck it? Not if you have absorbed Edmund Burke, and before him the efforts of Thomas Aquinas. The long standing human institutions are nearly as important as human nature. We can't kill these things without paying a heavy price. We need to include but transform traditions, we can't radically begin the world over again, even if some revolutionaries are foolishly willing to try. But religion can be legitimately transformed even without doing it for strategic conservative reasons.

We can see Heroism as Eros (defined as love upward by Ken Wilber) which leads the virtues of the Evolutionary Outward Path, and Saintliness as Agape (love downward) leading the virtues of the Involutionary Inward Path. The Twofold Path combines these Paths and retains traditional religion. Heroism leads material/supermaterial evolution toward real Godhood, Saintliness leads to the desire-free Soul-Within, the first glimpse of God. There is no phenomenal/noumenal distinction, there is only the material and supermaterial. The spiritual has been confounded with the supermaterial. This theological materialism can help to end the arguments of metaphysics and end the separation between religion and science.

Hypertrophied unworkable altruism doesn’t doom Christianity, which largely created its form of altruism by rejecting material desires, including competition, for all people, all groups. But the Inward God of Christianity and other religions, reached by complete non-attachment to material desires, needs to be transformed into the real Outward God, which can be reached over much time and evolution by the material and supermaterial evolution of a variety of groups, who can apply altruism within their groups in the evolutionary quest to reach real Godhood, the Godhood first only glimpsed symbolically in the Inward Path. Here cooperative competition is a workable outer form of good will. That is how an hypertrophied unworkable form of altruism doesn’t doom religion or altruism, and how altruism can remain an important aid in our sacred evolution to Godhood.