Resolving the problem of the individual and the group in traditional religion

I agree more or less with those scholars who say Christianity, in the West, invented the individual, and as a consequence developed liberalism. That is, those who mention Paul saying that there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free man, no male or female, and we are all the same in Christ Jesus. ( Modern Age, 2015, “The Individual and the Liberal State”)

The ancient world was grounded in group-selection, the city, the ethnostate, and they understood inequality in the order of nature. This accords with the renewed view of group-selection as the central unit of natural selection in human nature, as described by sociobiology

Pagans, of course, appreciated the individual, but it was the individual Greek or Norse warrior heroically sacrificing himself for his group which was especially celebrated.

I believe that the Twofold Path in theological materialism can resolve this dilemma, while upholding both traditional religion and the secular Enlightenment. It is in the Inward Path where the individual ascetic seeks the individual experience of the God or Father Within, and it is in the Outward Path where we evolve in the material world to real supermaterial Godhood, first symbolized in the Inward Path.

Real human nature, with kin and group-selection, and even xenophobia, can re-enter the religious world. The preferred political form of ethnopluralism with federalism can protect our human differences. Individual selection follows and is secondary to group-selection, which was the original creator of altruism, or caring about others in ones group. The radical rejection of each others social philosophy by religion and secularism need not take place. Deep conservatism can continue.

Restoring the Spirit-Will, the Soul, Religion, and Beauty in Theological Materialism

The Spirit-Will is almost immortal, I say “almost” because it is virtually a “self-moved mover.” Both the Spirit-Will and the Soul are material and require survival and reproduction to live on in succeeding generations.

If the activating Spirit-Will controls the material body well it may guide material life in evolving toward its destination of supermaterial Godhood, if not, both the Spirit-Will and the Soul may die. Life must interact with the natural forces of evolution, even with devolution and death, while it is seeking its sacred evolutionary goal. Our mission is to aid life in evolving toward Godhood.

The Soul is material, existing in the conscious mind, not unlike Plato's idea of the non-material Soul as the totality of the inner being. The Soul, or the highest consciousness, is applied in deeply apprehending religion or art. Unlike Plato's view, and the Hindu view, the Soul is not a non-material Idea or Form, it is the zenith of material consciousness, which can be applied to experiencing the God or Father Within, as well as the highest Beauty in religion and art, if the apprehender follows ascetic discipline, such as blocking material desires in the Inward Path. The Soul can apprehend the Spirit-Will at the zenith of the Soul, that is, at the zenith of human consciousness.

This seems to indicate that the activating Spirit-Will somehow has some sort of recollection or knowledge of Godhood. This is related to Beauty defined as the zenith of evolution, or Godhood---the Spirit-Will and the Soul see Beauty and Godhood as the highest consciousness.

Religion, philosophy, art, science, culture, politics, are superficial without including the sacred evolution of life toward Godhood.

In the Twofold Path, the Outward Path of the Spirit-Will is how life can reach its destination of supermaterial Godhood, which was first seen or experienced in the Inward Path, as the God or Father Within, at the highest consciousness of the Soul in traditional religions.  Now this is transformed in the Outward Path of material evolution, as described in theological materialism.

Resolving aimlessness in philosophy

Aimlessness seems to be a central problem in modern philosophy and science, that is, life is seen as having no long-term direction or purpose. Science speaks of the motivation to survival and reproduction, psychology speaks of the sex drive, philosophy speaks of the power drive, but these have no other aim, teleology is rejected, all directions are relative, there are no accepted deeper values or purposes. Art and politics follow with this aimlessness, they are superficial in their long-term non-direction because ultimately all the fields are interrelated.

The problem comes from thinking that all sacred or teleological long-term goals and purposes are non-materiel, when non-materialism has been repudiated in the modern world, as I think it should be---even quantum physics will be found to be material, though some may wish it not to be. But most importantly, the sacred goal of Godhood is not dead because Godhood is understood as the supermaterial zenith of material evolution. Aimlessness can fade away, sacred goals can return---they never really left us.

This is how aimlessness is resolved in theological materialism.

The value of things seen in theological materialism

The Platonic forms and Pauline values of “things not seen” has been greatly exaggerated in religion and philosophy. This is not saying that there are no vital things in the future which we cannot yet see or know, it is saying that things not seen have become almost the sole basis of existence and value in religion and philosophy---and in art also.

I emphasize the value of things seen in religion and philosophy, the value of the object rather than a definition or form. The zenith, the top priority in things is not a word, however sacred, and not a definition, but is the object, or objects, of materiel/supermaterial Godhood reached through material evolution.

Godhood at this time is, of course, unseen, but is not here understood as a non-material ideal, formula, word, or mere definition, but is a real living object or objects at the zenith of material evolution.

The greater reality here comes in the activation of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within life, which is material, and has a greater reality than other things in nature, while life interacts with nature and natural selection in evolution.

So the theory of theological materialism supplies a more grounded reality in the evolutionary solutions of existence and values over all. For example, science can enter religion and philosophy once again, and art can get back at least to an evolutionary realism, and material life need not be seen as ultimately fallen or sinful.

Toward an evolutionary religious understanding of natural law

I think the conservative understanding of history is in harmony with the evolutionary version of history in seeing earlier forms as precursors of later developments.

 

Natural law is natural behavior existing within us and around us. Natural law relates to the laws of nature in association with religion.

Nature allows both evolution and devolution. You may call devolution “sin,” but it is nevertheless part of nature and natural law.

Within this realm of devolution and evolution we have some free choice---religion, philosophy and science can help us make our choices.

Human nature evolved thousands of years ago to be kin-centered, gender defined, heterosexual marriage-making, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

Human law, and state law, should prudently harmonize as much as possible with human nature, the better to have peace and order in human societies.

For example, ethnopluralism, with the separation of powers, states and ethnic cultures is suggested by natural law and human nature, with some sort of protecting federalism.

Where are we going in relation to natural law and religion? Life is evolving toward Godhood, and we should aid in this evolution.

The ongoing evolution of life toward Godhood is the foundational direction of virtue and ethics, made sacred by religion.

The God first seen only inwardly in traditional religion is transformed yet retained as an earlier precursor of our material evolution to real Godhood, as described in theological materialism.

Affirming Plato in art, but redefining Godhood

I can affirm, as Plato did, an art that contains hymns to the Gods, and an art in praise of good men, but contrary to Plato, life evolves to Godhood in the material and supermaterial world. I also agree that the sacred in art should instruct but also delight, as Plato suggested, avoiding boring didactic art. The big difference with Plato here comes in defining Godhood as material and supermaterial, as that which we evolve to become in the material world.

This means that the abstract beauty of Plato, the Idea, is not the highest beauty but is only a secondary definition of the most beautiful material object, or supermaterial objects of Godhood at the zenith of evolution. As in Plato, Godhood remains the point of reference for absolute beauty, and for goodness, but it is not the non-material “beauty” of Plato. The Great Spiritual Blockade to real beauty and real Godhood is this way unblocked in art, as well as in philosophy and religion.

Plato says only once in his writings (according to Whitney Oates) that God creates the sacred Ideas, but in the rest of Plato he says life is the creation of the Demiurge, which is right in line with the esoteric understanding in traditional religion which rejects materialism by following the Inward Path and not the Outward Path to Godhood. To them God is not material or supermaterial but non-material---God is a sacred Idea or Word, or a so-called non-material blissful symbolic experience.

The realistic idealism of the ancient Greek sculptures of Gods and Goddesses, seen as the highest in human beauty, was on the right evolutionary artistic track toward the evolutionary realism and beauty we now can affirm, as we all evolve toward Godhood in the real and natural world.

Regathering Reality

The “regathering of...diffused matter and spirit,” (Poe, Modern Age Summer 2015) was a poetic way of trying to end the duality. But Poe attempted to close duality by regathering matter alchemically into spirit, when reality is just the opposite. Ascetics have for centuries made the same metaphysical error.

Duality is ended by standing religious philosophy and much of philosophy in general back on its feet after viewing reality on its head for too many centuries; the world is suffering a permanent vertigo.

Nothing comes from nothing. The materiel world evolves to supermaterial Godhood, with many starts and stops along the way, within the natural world. This is the unblocking of the Great Spiritual Blockade to real Godhood.

What else can save religion, philosophy, conservatism, and life itself?

Note toward the next balance of human nature, freedom and morality

Ethics: “norms of conduct for the particular group.“ (Stawrowski)

Group/Individual: In human nature the push and pull between the individual and the group, with the higher ethical, moral and biological priority going to the group, for survival and reproductive success.

Morality: Ideals and norms of conduct for the evolution of life on the planet and in the cosmos.

Resolution: The ethical values of the group are subject to the higher moral values of the evolution of the group toward Godhood, with distinctive groups protected by a federalism of separated powers, states and ethnic cultures, defined by ethnopluralism.

International sociobiological research centers (see Cattell) developed to aid all groups in the evolution of life toward Godhood, conservatively keeping the best of the past. Example: the traditional Inward Path religions of the symbolic God Within are retained but transformed in the Outward Path of material evolution to real supermaterial Godhood, that is, toward higher and higher consciousness, intelligence, beauty and goodness, as examined in theological materialism.

Can anything in postmodernism be retained?

The signifier might dominate over the signified but that does not make it reality, the postmodern world of words once again creates an unreal world and calls it reality. The way I put: words and definitions are secondary to the reality of the real objects defined---being and thought are not the same, even if Parmenides said so.

I turn the Vedic and Hindu sages (and their middle-eastern followers), and Plato, back on their feet from standing on their heads regarding reality and unreality. Nietzsche called this a transvaluation, but Godhood is retained in theological materialism as a living object, or objects, at the zenith of material and supermaterial evolution.

The God defined in the Inward Path as non-material with sacred words only is transformed in the Outward Path of natural and advanced evolution, which can lead to Godhood. Knowledge of God is transformed, not murdered.

Ultimate reality is bound by materialism and supermaterialism, which retains the scientific Enlightenment while here keeping Godhood. Old religion is newly grounded in sociobiology, with the deep conservatism of long-term evolution toward real Godhood.

Group-selection need not lead to authoritarianism, it leads to variety in ethnic cultures freely living within their own states, and protected by some version of federalism.

What is human? Freudian and Lacanian selfish individualism exists but is superseded in reality by the kin and group-selection of real human nature. Darwin's evolution is wrongly seen as only remorseless tooth and claw. Altruism in human nature developed the ethics of group-selection and social behavior, which is transformed in religion and political philosophy.

The Sacred Cause Within and Without

“Reproduction is not something done to an organism: it is something the organism does.” (David Oderberg, quoted by William Carroll, Modern Age, Summer 2015)

The activating Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within life is also something the organism itself does. This is the cause within. Outside selection and evolution work along with this sacred inward activation.

The Spirit-Will within life is this way the central aspect of life. The Spirit-Will is mot merely a principle or form, it is a living material or supermaterial thing.

The abstract world is not false, but it is far secondary to the real world of objects which it only defines or abstracts.

Nominalism takes place in science as well as religion, where concepts, ideas, and words become a false reality, even a God.

In theological materialism the Spirit-Will does not ask for a non-empirical acceptance, as traditional religion does, of its spirit and soul. There will one day be an empirical confirmation of the material nature of the Spirit-Will.

Life as something other than matter does not exist, but the supermaterial exists, although it is not yet fully understood.

The meaning of life cannot be separated from the evolutionary flow of life. Dualism is here denied.

In the Twofold Path, the Soul is a special state of mind---a high point in the mind---where that Inward God or Father is experienced. The Soul is not the Spirit-Will, and not the animator of life. Religious and philosophical ascetics rid themselves of material desires to experience the inner God of the Soul. The Soul within the material mind in the Inward Path is where Plato's forms exist as concepts experienced, as only symbolic ideas of the real Godhood reached in the Outward Path of material evolution, activated by the material Spirit-Will-To-Godhood.

How conservatism need not religiously fear the idea of evolutionary progress

Conservatism prefers the word “improvement” rather than “progress” because progress usually means having a social/cultural goal leading to state collectivism. But I think this attitude toward progress essentially stems from the “fallen man” and “original sin” perspective of traditional religion.

The fallen and sinful man perspective in traditional religion derived mainly from ancient Vedism, Buddhist and Judeo-Christian ascetics, and from Greek philosophers and medieval religious thinkers, who sought to experience the God or Father Within by blocking or ridding the body of material desires. Religious morality is essentially based in this ascetic inward goal, where outward material things are thought of as contrary to the inward goal.

I see this as a great metaphysical, reductionist, error. But it does not lead to rejecting religion, as Western science did, or as Nietzsche and his followers did. The Twofold Path in theological materialism retains the Inward Path as the first experience of the God Within, but transforms it in the Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution to real Godhood.

Conservatives and traditionalists need not censor the idea of progress when sacred evolution is included, because retaining the best of the past both biologically and culturally defines the deep conservatism necessarily involved in the long material evolution of life toward Godhood, the zenith of evolution, with starts and stops along the way.

When I think of conservatism I think of real human nature, which has now been reaffirmed by the science of sociobiology, where the social and cultural laws are seen as working best when in harmony with human nature, which remains kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.
 

I also see no good reason why the Outward Path of material evolution to Godhood needs to embrace big state collectivism. For example, ethnopluralism affirms small, free, independent states that eventually become ethnostates, protected by a light federalism, not unlike the separation of powers and states in the U. S. Constitution, which can also be retained. Research centers in the evolutionary sciences and humanities could be used, voluntarily, by all states and nations... I see this as conservative reform, and not as radical revolution.

Basic epistemology in theological materialism

A---The world of objects is actually out there and real.

B---Our minds developed physiologically to perceive the real world, instigated by the need to survive and reproduce successfully.

C---People, animals, different life forms, perceive the real world at different levels in their varied minds. Even hallucinations can be seen as another, incomplete, way of perceiving the world.

D---As we evolve higher consciousness and higher intelligence we perceive the real world better and better with more accuracy.

E---At the level of Godhood, which is reached through material and supermaterial evolution in the natural world, life will evolve the highest level of perceiving the real world, and the highest level of the truth.

F---This suggests that idealism not based in real material objects which are evolved to in the natural world, as well as relativistic postmodern mere definitions, need to change, or fade away.

Transforming Religion and Art

It seems obvious that economic problems move into political, philosophical, artistic, and finally religious problems. In this way “beauty” has aesthetic and moral dimensions, not one minus the other. Modern art went the other way, rejecting the moral dimension in art, regarding it as mere censorship.

Plato thought the moral dimension was virtually all in regarding economic, political, philosophical, artistic, and religious principles. In Plato's moral dimension the highest Idea, or Form was free of all material or even supermaterial attributes. I do not believe this is the zenith of reality, this was free of all reality, and Plato needs a trans-valuation.

The material world evolves to Godhood. This grounded evaluation brings a deeply conservative and a transformed view of art and religion. Admittedly this means believing in the value of “things not seen,” which leaves us open to the charge of idealism, or faith, but this time around the zenith of things is defined in the evolving, material and supermaterial world.

Defining the highest beauty, truth and goodness remains an evolving, working definition because we will not fully know Godhood until we evolve in the material and supermaterial world to Godhood. Beauty, like Godhood, is not untethered from the material world.

Philosophers and scientists, like poets, can also operate under divine inspiration, but it is inspiration grounded in the material activation within life, defined here as the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood, activating life to evolve toward supermaterial Godhood, balancing with natural selection. This material translation of Godhood, opposite Plato, helps define the highest beauty, truth, goodness, and reality.

Divinity Battles

In the early Greek wars between the old poet/shamans and the new Socratic/Platonic philosophers, the philosophers mainly won, setting the western agenda for both religion and philosophy. Jesus Christ revived a more eastern Buddhistic view of the world, and material desires, but this too was eventually channeled through the Greek philosophers by brilliant men such as St. Thomas Aquinas.

 

Theological materialism sees no duality between the zenith of reality and the material world. The Father Within of Christ, and Plato's Ideas, can only be fully seen, or experienced, by blocking all material desires. Seeing the Forms and the Inward God as more than a first glimpse of Godhood can in fact become a Great Spiritual Blockade toward evolving to real Godhood in the material world, if they are not understood in terms of the Twofold Path.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche attempted to kill the traditional God when he should have retained but transformed the Inward God to the Outward Path of material and supermaterial evolution to real Godhood. Nietzsche's will-to-power is not goalless or random or relative, as he suggested, it is really the inward material Spirit-Will-To-Godhood activating life to evolve to Godhood in the material and supermaterial world, along with evolution and natural selection. There is no duality here.

God is not dead, but we stand in need of a transformation from the Inward Path to the Outward Path, we require a working, evolutionary, material/supermaterial definition of Godhood, which life is always evolving toward.

Artistic freedom and affirming the sacred

I think artists tend to have “more music than honesty,” (a line by George Abbott, recently quoted by Derek Turner), and this is where I think Plato was right to be skeptical of artists. Once honesty leaves the room, truth and reality often follow, and reality and the existing culture begin to fade away. Music and humor are great salesmen, but hedonism and nihilism in art often follow the loss of honesty, which is what happened in modern Western art, which was not really art.

I think artists need to be free to create, to improvise, but with improvisations on subjects more sacred to the people than profane. The greatest art in human history was an affirmation of the sacred. I think this needs to be revived in art. I would like to see artists---call them evolutionary realists---make art, music, humor and improvisations which affirm the religious philosophy of theological materialism.

To attain Godhood we need to evolve in harmony with the laws of real nature, activated by the material and then supermaterial Spirit-Will-To-Godhood within life. This can bring art and science legitimately back to religion. What has come before in religion and philosophy can be retained but considered as incomplete glimpses or experiences of real Godhood, which all life strives to evolve toward in the cosmos. This is the affirmation of the sacred which I think is needed in art. Perhaps then we can have great again.

One Realm of Beauty

I see the same error in defining two realms of beauty in Plato as in his two realms of Being. The beauty of sights and sounds, of living objects, is real beauty, and the “idea” of beauty as defined in the abstract is secondary.

Plato thought his kind of God first made the Idea of, say, a bed, but I say these objects evolved in the material world along with the idea of a bed in our minds. If there is an “ideal bed” it is evolved to in the material/supermaterial world. The reality is not the idea but the bed itself. Efforts at defining the zenith of evolution with finality probably can't be made final because life is always evolving, so we can only have working definitions of Godhood.

The thought that art itself is inferior to the Idea in art needs to be transvalued, as does our abstract definition of the “word” as God. The reality and truth of art and of life is in the living evolving object, evolving all the way to Godhood.

This does not change the definition of high art as the affirmation of the sacred, which Plato might agree with. But the sacred is seen as the zenith of material and supermaterial evolution. This suggests that our view of art involves our whole worldview. Questions about the sacred future seem to move through all the fields, religion, philosophy, science, art, etc. but they end up grounded in material and supermaterial evolving life.

One Realm of Being Not Two

Plato promoted two realms of being, as religious thinkers more or less did before him, but this was a great spiritual blockade, blocking the material evolution of life to supermaterial Godhood for thousands of years. Theological materialism seeks to remedy this error.

We can retain God, or more precisely Godhood, but a Godhood transformed from the inward path to the outward path of material and supermaterial evolution. Plato's God, the Vedic God, the Judaic/Christian/Islamic God, were the first inward glimpses or experiences of real Godhood reached through outward material evolution.

The real world is material and the spiritual world only reflects it, not the other way around. Material science and philosophical naturalism made a largely successful attempt to unblock the great spiritual blockade, but science cut too deeply and removed the sacred goal of life itself, and rejected the sacred inward activation of our outward material evolution to Godhood. This sacred goal is recovered in theological materialism.

Reasonable faith and a naturalistic idealism can enter the scientific worldview. Even the quantum forces do not support the spiritual, as some have sought to do, they are material forces, yet to be fully understood. Contrary to the long-lasting false duality, there is one realm of being, not two, and it is a material/supermaterial, phenomenal realm, not a non-material, noumenal realm.

The balancing problem of ethnopluralism

People on the right mainly affirm libertarian individualism, and modern liberalism on the left seeks to liberate the individual from collective or group identity. Advocates of ethnopluralism---ethnic states and ethnic regions for diverse ethnic cultures, protected by some kind of federalism---have few friends on the right or the left.

But ethnopluralism has a powerful if unstated well-wisher in the affirmation of real human nature, as recently reaffirmed by sociobiology. Every human culture ever studied included, among other things, kin-selection preferences, incest taboos, marriage, hierarchy, division of labor, gender differentiation, localism, ethnocentrism, and even xenophobia, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. If a culture proposes to not include these things, the culture does not last long and it will always return to these things only slightly changed.

As the great E. O. Wilson has written: “...Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue. So it came to pass that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection...The conflict might be the only way in the entire Universe that human-level intelligence and social organization can evolve. We will find a way eventually to live with our inborn turmoil, and perhaps find pleasure in viewing it as the primary source of our creativity. (“The Meaning of Human Existence”).

I believe we will return culturally to the central traits of human nature over time. In the United States we could accommodate a transformation into ethnostates and regions backed by the separation of powers and states in the U.S. Constitution. Otherwise the U.S. could break apart in civil war followed by some sort of martial law to create order, until a natural ethnopluralism once again balances out the problems.

Sorry for not posting recently.  I will be back posting in about a week.   KA 

Beyond Eliot's Four Quartets

T. S. Eliot's earlier view of the world seems to have been brought on by the philosophical errors of F. H. Bradley's idealism, Eliot's miserable marriage, and his reading of Parisian French poetry. But Eliot's thinking eventually led to his so-called deliverance in Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot's poem “The Wasteland” eventually led to the religious conversion of the “Four Quartets.” Along the way he renounced his American citizenship, and also won a Noble prize.

Eliot was an important man, an important poet, but to my mind, he was not enough. I sympathize with Eliot, but his solutions did not save Western civilization. He helped sink Western civilization further down in the Great Spiritual Blockade. Other men sensing the same wasteland chose Marxism or Scientism or Existentialism, which also did not save Western civilization.

I believe we have to move beyond the solution of Eliot's Four Quartets toward theological materialism, which is the deepest kind of conservatism, based in the biological and superbiological evolution of material life to real supermaterial Godhood.

As I have written here, the transformation of the material into the supermaterial comes not the way some modern physicists have attempted to save religion by turning the quantum world into the spiritual world, but by the opposite, by understanding the spiritual world as the supermaterial world. One day a new theory will reveal the deeper material reality behind the subatomic world. Quantum mechanics is a form of materialism (electrical?) yet to be fully defined.

The revealed religions center on the Inward God not the Outward God. The Inward God is the experience of the mirror image of Outward God (opposite Plato), which is a supreme supermaterial living object, or objects, evolved to in nature. Both Paths are conservatively contained within the Twofold Path of theological materialism. The Spirit-Will-To-Godhood and Godhood are not immaterial entities, as they are in Aristotle, Aquinas, Eliot, and even in Darwin.

The cosmos is arranged so as to be able to evolve Gods who evolve in the natural world, beginning with the Primal Material, probably from inorganic and natural causes. But those natural causes include the material-activating Spirit-Will, which ever seeks eternal representation, or Godhood, and evolves forward with many starts and stops and backward goings along the way, shaped by outside selection and natural evolution.

This realism actually reverses many religious and philosophical views of reality, which essentially worship concepts and sacred words, and consider concepts and words as real, and real material objects as unreal. Spiritualism and much of philosophy consider material objects as unreal and unreal concepts as real.

To attain Godhood we must evolve in harmony with the laws of real nature, activated by the material and then supermaterial Spirit-Will-To-Godhood. This can bring science and materialism legitimately back to religion. What has come before in religion and philosophy can be retained but considered as incomplete glimpses or experiences of real Godhood, which all life strives to evolve toward.

I have said here often, I don't believe we can stop the decline of the West by a revival of fascism or communism, although that may happen for a time in an attempt to create order out of our disorder. The world is now too crowded with distinct, competing, ethnic cultures for a single dictatorship over all to be successful. Eventually human nature will reassert itself and break back up into a natural ethnopluralism.

Human nature takes its shape from the genes and from the reaction of genes to the environment, but the shape does not venture beyond the shape of the genes without getting pulled back. There have been many cultural schemes which tried to go beyond the shape of human nature and they did not work and caused greater suffering.

Human nature remains kin-centered, gender defined, age-grading, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection.

This natural view of human nature strongly suggests that ethnopluralism is the best way to prevent the demise of the United States and the West, with ethnostates for distinct ethnic cultures, protected by some sort of federalism.

It is fortunate that our Founding Fathers set up a separation of powers and states in the U. S. Constitution which could accommodate---if we have the wisdom to do so---the saving grace of ethnopluralism.

It is a long road from here to there but nothing is more important than preventing our demise. If we survive we can continue the sacred evolution of life toward Godhood.

Defining beauty, truth and goodness biologically and superbiologically

I think beauty requires a biological or superbiological living definition, and not merely a moral or aesthetic definition. The zenith of beauty is this way defined as the zenith of material evolution, which is supermaterial Godhood. This is not a God merely of Ideas, and not a non-material God. Moral and aesthetic definitions only follow this living, material, evolutionary definition.

This turns Platonism, and traditional religion, back on its feet. The Sophist's who were disparaged by Plato were more right than Plato when they defined the beautiful as a beautiful girl, even though, like Plato, they did not take into account the material and supermaterial evolution of beauty toward real Godhood.

The Idea of beauty, truth and goodness is secondary to to the real, living, beautiful object, not the other way around. These values and virtues are only made real in relation to the living biological or superbiological object.

Truth and goodness also have to relate to the living biological or superbiological object and not merely the “universal” Idea of truth and goodness. Beauty might even be closer than truth and goodness to defining the "real," because beauty seems to be less abstract.

Life creates beauty and truth, good and evil. Life always begins again in the primal material, which is activated from within by the material or supermaterial Spirit-Will-To-Godhood seeking to activate life and itself, along with natural selection, to evolve toward the highest beauty, truth and goodness. Death and devolution, though constant, are not defined as good.
 

As we become conscious of our real human nature, within nature, and the biological foundation of beauty, truth and goodness, we can help life evolve toward Godhood. The now popular advancement or enhancement of artificial intelligence (AI) should be seen as only a tool of biological enhancement and not the goal. AI can even block biological human evolution, which at this time is not considered politically correct.