Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Religion the day after tomorrow (from 2013)


A new/old religion, a new worldview, a new philosophy and psychology rising, with evolution as the common ground, is presented in the religion of the projected Theoevolutionary Church and the Twofold Path, and the philosophy of theological materialism, which does not take away the old religions with a bland universalism, or take away nationalism, ethnostates, group separateness and the uniqueness of each group. It is a world religion based on the evolution of all groups, all races, all people, while preserving ethnic distinctions and national identities. All the parts are seen as independent yet part of the nobler whole, guided by international religious-scientific centers (as Raymond Cattell suggested) with the parts working together in a realistic cooperative competition, since competition is healthy for evolution. Persuasion rather than coercion is the method of this religious philosophy in the world. We all can affirm the evolutionary mission, bringing beauty and intelligence and character as evolution proceeds. Wisdom is shared among the whole of planetary life, each contributes, knowing they are part of the greater sacred mission of evolving to ascending levels of Godhood in the cosmos.

How do we make sacred our morals and values in the face of 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 traditional Inward God is a mirror of Outward Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution: that affirms conservative not radical  change.

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 and Roman philosophy, whereas the East has been religious traditionally without this sort of positive 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 traditional religion, from Neoplatonism to Catholic Scholasticism to the theological materialism of the Theovolutionary Church.

Does this present only an oddball flaky utopia? Can we do this? We are capable of it. Perhaps I should say as Wilmot Robertson said about the advent of ethnostates, the religion presented is not so much about conditions as they exist today or tomorrow, but with the day after tomorrow, when we will have reached the point where we will choose between theological materialism and Theoevolutionary Church or no religion and no philosophy at all.

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