Hopeful future thinking during tough times: A short introduction to the Twofold Path and the projected Theoevolutionary Church (from 2013)

The transfiguring goal for Friedrich Nietzsche in his early writings was the creation of great men, a republic of genius. Although that was important it was not enough. Renewal requires the religious goal of our material evolution to Godhood in the cosmos, which brings a far more exalted renewal of consciousness, and contains the power to revive religion, philosophy and art in the modern world.

Early Nietzsche could not see his way out of the loss of both religion and science other than through the rebirth of art-myth as a guide to truth, along with creating individual great men as the goal of culture. Nietzsche thought that this loss of myth was the result of the reasoning ideal of Socrates which supposedly destroyed myth, and also after the “historical sense” and the abstract pursuit of knowledge for knowledge sake in modern times further destroyed myth and religion. Nietzsche thought Kant helped this destruction along by showing the limits of knowledge, and Schopenhauer by adding the Will as the superior force to all knowledge.

It is not essentially tragic music, as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer thought, which expresses “the immediate language of the will,” it is evolution. It is not the will to power but the material inward evolutionary will to Godhood, or Tirips, that activates life and is the real source for a renewal of mythopoetic power, which evolution and natural selection then shapes. Evolution is the source of the super-epic for art, affirming the high struggle to attain Godhood. Art can bring religion to life but it is not religion.

Religion and philosophy can recognize evolutionary religion, politics can help create it, and art and religious rituals can affirm it. Our evolution can even be democratic, with a federal system respecting and protecting the independent parts of the whole, ethnostates can be affirmed maintaining the separate variety which advances evolution best; we can gradually evolve beyond the human sub-species toward ascending levels of Godhood.

The Twofold Path brings together inward traditional religion with outward material-supermaterial evolution. The Twofold Path offers conservatism and synthesis to religion and science, and allows the new to work along with the old, without the damage done from radical revolution, and most importantly it offers the divine evolutionary path to real Godhood.

I did not erect theological materialism on the ruins of Christianity, as modern thinkers did with science and the humanities, I wanted to renew the building, not tear it down. This rebirth was done through the Twofold Path, where the God-Within, the Father-Within, is seen as the first glimpse, or the mirror of the Godhood reached through material and supermaterial evolution. But this was a revelatory insight too and not done simply to retain Christianity, and not done because I respect the conservative thinkers who see the great value for life in traditions.

Theological materialism and the projected Theoevolutionary Church revive both religion and science after modern life could not retrieve them as a satisfactory guide to truth. This brings along Nietzsche's goal of evolving increasingly great men, and also the sacred goal of attaining real Godhood in evolution in the Outward Path, the outward God first seen and mirrored in the Inward Path of the great religions.