The future of religion transformed (from the archive)

Matter is energy, but energy is matter. There would be no matter without energy but also no energy without matter. Do we really want to rate one higher than the other? I would then rate living matter as more evolved than simple energy. Spiritualism turns the real material world upside-down and claims that the religious/philosophical ideal is not really material, is not matter, or is more sacred energy than lowly matter. They claim that their supreme ideas are non-material and Godlike, or even God.

Why the hatred of the material world even to the point of blocking all material desires or blocking all life, at least for ascetics? They do it so that they can dwell in the blissful bodily experience of supreme ideas, unbothered and unaffected by material desires. It is a cloistered world ultimately driven by hedonism.

The main problem with traditional asceticism is that it blocks the path of material evolution to real supermaterial Godhood, which requires material desires, but channeled desires that need to genetically and culturally funnel evolving life-forms toward the supermaterial zenith of beauty, truth and goodness. This allows material science to enter religion as a help-mate. That is the future of religion transformed.

We can conservatively keep the old ascetic inward path to the "god" within in the Twofold Path, but only as a symbolic glimpse of the real Godhood reached in the outward path of material evolution to real Godhood.

 

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Spirit is Matter

Matter was Spirit to Teilhard de Chardin. He believed he had resolved a core conflict of the split between Matter and Spirit, between Body and Soul. He believed he understood that the evolution of matter was one and the same with the evolution of spirit (consciousness).

"The Way Teilhard Saw It"

               Spirit did not by the touch of the divine
               call lowly Matter to life,
               rather Matter was Spirit
                     from the absolute beginning
               latent with unimaginable power
               in the embryo of a cosmic mustard seed
               dreaming of bursting into flower!
                     -- Charles C. Finn, August 10, 2021”

Theological materialism sees it the opposite way: spirit is matter, there is no spirit. Spirit and matter are of one essence and not dualistic, just as energy can “freeze” into matter, and matter can unfreeze into energy. It's not really accurate to say that matter is the inferior aspect of spirit and spirit the superior aspect of matter, spirit is really super-materiality and not something apart from matter. This means you really can't define spirit and matter as good and evil, but you can define matter as evolved and unevolved. Evolution is the activation of the will to life within matter to evolve to Godhood, working along with outside evolution and national selection. Godhood is ascending levels of super-materiality.