How very rare real Godhood is, or will be

We have had at least five mass extinctions on earth where we lost almost all life on earth (eg. 85-90 percent), and many smaller extinctions, perhaps usually having to do with great climate change or disasters.  It would seem that given this pattern there will be more extinctions to come. Add to that the possibility of life destroying itself with war, greed, or  whatever.  As some have suggested, if we assume life on other planets would have gone through similar extinctions and destructions, that could help explain why we seem to have not been contacted, at least openly, by extraterrestrial intelligent life. Few if any species would have evolved far enough to escape from their own planetary extinctions or would have had time to evolve space travel.

So we see how difficult it will be to advance the deepest promise of life evolving to Godhood, and how very rare real Godhood is, or will be. But life will always try for it as the zenith of the success of life, because that activation defines what life is in its essence.

Theological materialism, ethnopluralism, and divine purpose

Marxism, the left, and modern liberalism do not really believe the multiculturalism they espouse, all the world must become exactly what they are.
 

Real respect for variety and diversity comes with ethnopluralism, where there are many ethnic groups, many races and cultures, living in their own territories.
 

One evolutionary religious philosophy and one political philosophy actually affirm this variety and independence: theological materialism and ethnopluralism.
 

Federalism, the modern form of subsidiarity, can offer protection for these differences in ethnic groups and ethnic states.
 

But there is an overall direction and purpose in life and therefore in theological materialism, which is applied in ethnopluralism: the successful evolution of material life to supermaterial Godhood.
 

This divine plan can be guided over great time by international sociobiological research centers, voluntary, open to all, and advised by the religious philosophy of theological materialism.

Answering Nietzsche's Group Problem

To be healthy, morality and human values need to work in harmony with nature, with sociobiology. Morality is not merely a completely relative will-to-power, as Nietzsche seems to have thought it was in his dismissing morality for not relating to Nature. Nietzsche's concept of immorality is also a concept free of nature since morality is very much a part of nature in helping group-selection.

I see Nietzsche's project as mainly an attempt to affirm the great genius creators over everyone and everything else, missing the basic importance of group-selection which is necessary to allow geniuses to survive and prosper. I think Raymond Cattell had a better grasp of this in understanding that the task of society and evolution is to tell the difference between social and anti-social geniuses, and not to denigrate group-values.

The ECC project is to update Hegel and Darwin. To make evolution and history part of religion. To revitalize Christianity and religion in general. To give a moral answer to Nietzsche and his follower’s immorality. To bring back philosophical naturalism to philosophy and religion by way of theological materialism. To bring religion and science together. To bring evolutionary realism  to art. To affirm the object over the concept of the object. To re-position the Outward Path over the Inward Path while keeping both. To affirm that all life is evolving to Godhood, not from Godhood. To have the ethos of evolution involved in morality in general.  And to affirm the Ethnopluralism Hypothesis in political philosophy..... Constructive help in this is not turned down.

No need to live in the past

Do you kind of like the order of the medievalist age? According to James Wilson (Modern Age, Summer 2013) de Tocqueville thought decentralized federalism, as in the United States, might be an analogue to the order of the feudal age. This political view also better allows human nature to flourish, which was evolved over thousands of years and prefers its own locality, variety and its own people.

Our Constitution originally affirmed the separation of powers, which we need to get back to. Pining after the old aristocracies, which basically created the West, will get us nowhere. We can be an ally to the material world and the bourgeoisie which overcame the aristocracies, they can be included in the great evolution of life to Godhood. The acquisitive appetites and the “progress” of the bourgeoisie in fact balance with the thrust of life evolving to Godhood. Theological materialism lives in the world.

The conservatism of the Evolutionary Christian Church looks forward and not backward as much of conservatism does. Religion is brought back to the world since we evolve materially and supermaterially to Godhood. It is the Godhood of future evolution that is featured. The Father Within of the old religions is transformed, not rejected, into the Godhood reached in evolution. The great religions can be seen as the prototype of order, unity and dedication transformed in the ECC.

Does this “disenchant” religion or the aristocratic past? No, it revitalizes and redeems the past, which has been dying, slowly at first and now quickly.

In order to enter the future we need to bring religion and culture back to real human nature

Our task is as big as Nietzsche's task, but more religious and conservative. In order to enter the future we need to return to the distant past where the human nature we have today was developed and evolved. We have to go back to before the great religions and philosophies were developed, back to hunter-gatherer times thousands of years ago, and learn about ourselves from those times.

Darwin and sociobiology defeated the “tabula rasa” hypothesis but you wouldn't know it from the affectations of modern culture. Our human nature today is a collection of genetic and mental patterns developed during hunter-gatherer times and our cultures are the product of that same human nature adapting to the environment. Our real human nature is defined by such things as gender differences, age-grading, marriage-making, hierarchy, ethnocentrism, religion-making, group-selection, and all of these traits are blocked or rejected by our pretentious modern culture.

But the origin of our culture lies even deeper within the morals and values of the great religions which developed the Involutionary Inward Path seeking the God Within. The Father Within is reached by blocking or stopping the drives of human nature and evolution. The central thrust of our task is to turn religion and philosophy back to real human nature and to open up the great spiritual blockade of morals and values which have devalued, blocked and nearly killed real human nature and culture.

The Involutionary Inward Path needs to be transformed in the Evolutionary Outward Path, the Father Within is “only” the symbolic blissful experience of what Godhood will be like when Godhood is reached by evolving in the material and supermaterial world to Godhood. This exhumes the material world and revives human nature and culture.

We do not murder God and religion as Nietzsche tried to do when he saw some of the same serious cultural and biological problems we see. The religious philosophy of theological materialism renews religion and culture, as the Evolutionary Christian Church and the Twofold Path make sacred our evolution on earth and out into the cosmos toward real Godhood. 

The super-materialization of the sacred

The Outward Path evolution of material and supermaterial life to Godhood in the cosmos is made more real, more concrete, as a theology of love, than the traditional religious Inward Path transformations, seen as human to divine, eros to agape, kama to prema, which are also affirmed in the Twofold Path of the the Theoevolutionary Church (TC). Theological materialism is not so much a “secularization of the sacred” (Joseph Campbell's term) as it is a super-materialization of the sacred.

With evolution, love for the particular in real survival and reproduction, for example, love for a beautiful woman, literally becomes love for the supermaterial divine, both are living objects, not abstractions, not inner Godhood, not merely symbols, but the real thing which we can evolve to.

This is bringing new mythology, new-old religion to a myth-starved, God-starved modern world.

On tolerant syncretism

The Evolutionary Christian Church wants to have a tolerant syncretism regarding the great religions, stemming from the Involutionary Inward Path to the God Within which they all share. What the ECC adds and synthesizes is the Evolutionary Outward Path of natural evolution to Godhood, which brings many other fields into religion, such as the science of evolution.

This way we enter the future with a religion of the past and the future. An example might be how Hinduism seems to have handled syncretism better than Christianity. The ECC brings religion full circle back even to the ancient naturalism of religion before religion soared into object-free spiritual monotheism. We affirm natural evolution to supermaterial Godhood.

This does not defy the age we live in, this includes and transforms the age. As Walter Kaufmann pointed out, the etymology of the word “religion” derives from “religare,” to tie, to bond. The meaninglessness of modern philosophy leads to futility. At their best all fields become one.

Bringing back poetry and myth to religion

Unlike the older pagans, the revealed religions have said that God cannot be objectified or embodied, God is no It but only Thou. This, which both the Hindu's and Moses revealed, ended up rejecting the objectifying myths of the earlier age.

It seems true that when the poetry is taken out of religion it damages or even kills religion. I have more or less added poetry to both Christianity and to Raymond Cattell's noble religion from science, which he called Beyondism, not for the sake of saving religion, but because I have seen the unconscious intention of the Spirit-Will-To-Godhood activating material life to Godhood, later shaped by natural evolution, and science has not affirmed this yet, nor do the revealed religions.

Although it defies standard interpretations, this brings back poetry and myth to religion, as we can embark upon the heroic mission of evolving from man to superman to supermaterial Godhood in the cosmos.

This religious philosophy also retains the first glimpse of Godhood seen inwardly by the Hindus and by Moses, in the Twofold Path, which allows a Revitalized Conservatism and an Ordered Evolution.

A Very Tall Order

According to Quentin Taylor, around the time of  "The Birth of Tragedy” early Nietzsche wanted art and philosophy (thinking of Schopenhauer and Wagner) to take the place of failed myth and religion, but Nietzsche knew that art and philosophy would have to fulfill the same needs previously satisfied by myth and religion. That is, it would need to bestow life with meaning again, unify experience, preserve horizons, direct these activities, provide a link to the sacred, and finally to persuade society to embrace these things. This was a very tall order indeed and even early Nietzsche was never quite sure that this could fully take place.

The religion of the Evolutionary Christian Church and the philosophy of theological materialism has not given up on religion. It has the same hope of fulfilling the needs of failed religion. Western culture is a decaying mess mainly due to having rejected religion, or having had religion destroyed by the forces against it. This time science can be added to religion as an aid in our nature-sanctioned evolution toward Godhood in the cosmos. A very tall order indeed. Our survival may depend on it.

Choosing contemplation or action, past or future?

People think in terms of two kinds of "defense" against what Eliade called the largely deterministic “terror of history”: action or contemplation. The revealed religions chose contemplation, at least the mystical elite did, by going inward with the Involutionary Inward Path to experience the Father Within, the God-Within. This can block the terror of history, but does it really make it go away?

It is the the Outward Path, the Evolutionary Outward Path, which takes real action against the terror of history, by helping to advance life toward Godhood in evolution. But we may also affirm the Inward Path of contemplation as the mirror, or virtual experience, of the Outward Path leading to Godhood. This is the Twofold Path of the Evolutionary Christian Church.

The past, the primitive, the nonmaterial is idealized by the traditionalist school, but we can also idealize and affirm the future with our feet on materialistic ground, because  the furthest we go is to supermaterialism, which helps define Godhood. We can contemplate the past but we don't seek to go there, we take action toward the future.

This is a truly modern religious view which says that there is not really a timeless world of shamanistic, sacred, heaven-time.  All is in time, including Godhood, which we evolve to in time. A Jungian might ask, is not Godhood a sacred, timeless, archetype, appearing at different places in time? If Godhood is an archetype it seems to be a super-instinct within the DNA of life itself, the inward, supermaterial, Spirit-Will seeking Godhood by activating life, which is outwardly shaped by the ups and downs of natural evolution.

All nations can be humanely guided by social psychology, and religion, to avoid the tragedy of collapse, and to evolve

Cultural Marxism, the philosophy of political correctness needs to fade so that human beings can avail themselves of social psychological studies which can now measure how healthy a country is in relation to its survival. Psychometrics and factor analysis have made this possible (see the work of the late Raymond Cattell). The social psychologist can draw a profile of a nation or a small state the way a psychologist draws a profile of an individual. The morality level of a country can be measured by such things as fewer deaths from venereal diseases, lower percentage of illiterates, energy consumption, and so on, all the way to the more controversial genetic and cultural qualities of intelligence and character involved in the fitness of a culture. If we know the signs of a dying condition prior to the decline of a nation, the nation can be humanely guided to avoid the tragedy of collapse.

In the short term the ethical system of the Theoevolutionary Church is based on the goal of human evolution, adjusted to the given environment and the given people. The longer term sacred goal is to evolve to Godhood in the cosmos, the God first seen in the Inward Path of the Revealed Religions. That is the nucleus of the religion, a religion of the future and the past, connected by the Twofold Path to the traditional Inward God and to evolutionary Outward Godhood. The global power masters embedded in the institutions and corporations of the West are now exploiting cultural Marxism and political correctness, but once this corrupting force has lost its influence, we can build a real future and a real morality people can believe in.

Religion and Evolution

Raymond Cattell and others have pointed out that it was the natural selection of groups rather than individuals (listen up libertarians) that gave us concern for ethical values, often tied to religion. The natural selection of individuals had to fit the natural selection of groups, otherwise the group would disappear. Ethics developed from this inter-group selection for the group, and religion usually fostered mutual love and self-sacrifice, as in the Ten Commandments.

But it is not just the ethical values of the survival of the group, it is what behavior contributes to the evolution of the group as well. The religion of the Theoevolutionary Church (TC) emphasizes the sacred evolution to Godhood. And it is also important to emphasize what ethical rules govern interacting groups. This then leads to a worldview of many small states, each with its variation of bio-cultural ethics advancing toward Godhood, and with all the states protected by a light federalism.

The Church guides, voluntarily, and includes research on human behavior, and examines which ethics lead to  successful survival and evolution, and the workable interactions between groups.TC does not replace the ethics of the Revealed Religions ( as Beyondism seems to advocate), TC adds research from sociobiology to the Involutionary Inward Path of the Revealed Religions, on the great mission of all groups evolving to Godhood by way of the Evolutionary Outward Path. This defines the Twofold Path.  Ordered Evolution and Revitalized Conservatism are the methods, not revolution.   

Groups and Evolution

In evolution, natural selection is applied to both individuals in groups, and between groups, just as evolution works on biology as well as culture in a feedback loop. Individuals do not successfully survive without a group, and so the evolution of groups become paramount in selection. Ethics largely grew out of this arrangement, advancing the behavior that helped the group survive, such as mutual love and even self-sacrifice. This is all part of human nature developed long ago during the Hunter-Gatherer period of human history (and before ). We still retain this very same human nature. Social organizations that deny or try to go against this basic human nature do not last for long. Survival and lack of survival are sure signs of success and failure.

The attitude of Theoevolutionary Church toward the evolution of individuals and groups is like a benevolent, libertarian guide, affirming the idea of groups developing with their own independence and personalities, for example, living in small independent localities and states, with the Church available to help and guide the variety of people, as the whole moves toward Godhood in evolution. All available research and knowledge from sociobiology, genetics, religion etc. are utilized.

As it turns out the original Constitution of the United States can be applied here because it gives great independence to small states and localities while protecting the whole with a light federalism. The protecting of the whole keeps in check any actual war breaking out within what Cattell called healthy “cooperative competition” between the groups. War is not evolutionary, it is a halt in evolution. This political set up could work with Europe of a thousand states, or a China of two thousand states, which has been suggested. This harmonizes with human nature rather than trying to fight against it, or block it. The religion of Theoevolutionary Church makes sacred the evolution which has brought us from the simple to the complex, as we all evolve to Godhood, all groups, all races, all states, in natural variety. This is the religion of the future. 

TC, Beyondism, and Science

The Theoevolutionary Church (TC) follows the rational path, but also moves into unempirical areas, as Hegel and others did. Yet we hope later that empirical facts validate the intellectual intuition and mysticism of TC. This mysticism defines TC more legitimately as a religion than Beyondism, the excellent religion from science of the great Raymond Cattell.

I agree with Cattell that science can help mold spiritual values, but unlike the stricter science of Beyondism, we do affirm a form of “progressivism” in evolution. Life is evolving to Godhood, and with this unempirical statement we do not wait to see the results of evolution--success or failure-- before we define a goal to evolution.  But we certainly apply the more scientific and natural pragmatism as well.

Cattell's hope for evolution is to avoid stagnation which creates obsolescence, this could be called his base for Beyondism, minus the unempirical religious goal of life evolving to Godhood.

It it true that the direction of evolution must remain approximate—even science usually can only deal in probabilities. We can say that we, and evolution, are on the path to Godhood and that we seek higher intelligence, higher consciousness, and more beauty, but these will require more precise science. As Cattell points out, even medicine is seen as an art, but the benefit of working with imprecise goals in medicine can be far better than without medicine.

However, we don't forget, during the ongoing process of scientific developments in sociobiology, that Godhood is the goal of our evolution, and that Godhood is the divine place where we reach the Absolutes of intelligence, consciousness, beauty and power.

Unlike Beyondism we are attached to the Revealed Religions in retaining the Involutionary Inward Path to the God-Within---this Twofold Path gives us a conservative base. We add the Evolutionary Outward Path of evolution to Godhood, which was first seen inwardly in the Revealed Religions. This seems to give us a better psychological position to advance than Beyondism, as well as providing the order of conservatism that  allows us to better retain any positive mutations and advances in evolution---we call this Ordered Evolution.

Meanwhile a social organization needs to be built so that we can move beyond temperamentally individualistic thinkers.

The religion of the future

The Zohar says “everything lies veiled in numbers” but the opposite seems true, numbers are substitutes for Objects. The great obsession with numbers has given numbers a plastic life of their own.

True Being, Godhood, or the Supreme Object has been forgotten, or never known, replaced by numbers or symbolic ideas, imposed upon culture, making culture more of a machine than a living thing.

Evolutionary alchemy, and not numbers alchemy, is the evolution to Godhood, or civilizing the so-called beast of materialism into Supermaterial Godhood, the base into gold, by way of Ordered Evolution.

This is the central activation of all life from within, which is then shaped from outside by evolution.  All living things, all people, all races, and not just a noble Aryan, chosen Jew or enlightened Buddhist, can take part in the evolution to Godhood. 

A Just world can find a way, a political configuration to affirm this sacred evolution to Godhood.  We suggest a nation, or world, of small states, virtual ethnostates, with their independence protected by a light federalism, and guided in evolution, voluntarily, by the Church. 

The Sacred Ground Of Instincts

Unlike the ever courageous Raymond Cattell, I see the “ergic endowment,” the basic instincts, grounded in the Will To Godhood, or the Spirit-Within. Cattell suggests sublimating sex and aggressive ergic drives into evolutionary paths, and that I can agree with, but one doesn't want to sublimate the sacred ergic drive of the Spirit, which activates life to evolve to Godhood.

Religion is not merely frustrated ergs, religion should be centered in the prime instinct, the sacred instinct of the Spirit or the Will To Godhood. That is, we need to center on the instinct of the Spirit rather than frustrate this instinct.

Cattell quotes Tennyson saying, “Move upward, working out the beast, and let the ape and tiger die.”

But we must civilize the beast of the instincts rather than let them die, because the beast is grounded in the sacred Spirit, the Will To Godhood Within, even if the beast does not have the mind to see. Human religion need not let the ground of religion, the Spirit, die---the Will to Godhood is our only means to attain Godhood.

Priorities In Ethics

Ones own self, kin, ethnic group have first priority, but one also wants all life to evolve to Godhood, the goal of all nature.

A hierarchy of ethics as considered by Raymond Cattell can apply, where ethics toward group members, group government, other group governments, members of other groups, individuals in the Church, and the Evolutionary Goal of Godhood, follow in a hierarchy of values. I define the Prime Force, or the Holy Spirit, the Spirit-Will as the first priority, driving all things toward Godhood.

The greatest wisdom is related to further development of evolution. Morality and ethics in the Evolutionary Outward Path in the Evolutionary Christian Church regarding behavior toward one self and ones fellow man is mainly in relation to upward evolution to Godhood.

On The Buddha

I watched the PBS documentary “The Buddha” last evening, and while I understand television can't go in depth, I felt that many things said about the Buddha were inaccurate or wrong.

The Hindus and the Vedic sages had arrived at the state of Nirvana long before Buddha, but this was not said, apparently in an attempt to elevate Buddhism.

The goal of Nirvana is essentially the goal of other religions, only different terminology and somewhat different paths are taken. Terms like Heaven and the Father are used, and different methods of ridding the body of desire are applied in all religions.

Mara, desire, is not done away with by the Buddha, Mara is blocked in what we call The Great Spiritual Blockade against material evolution to Godhood.

Buddha did not “transcend” the world, he blocked the world, he was not bothered by the world because in his successful attempt to end suffering he had blocked all desires of the world.

Indeed ones mind can be freed with Nirvana achieved, but it is freed at the expense of not evolving to Godhood.

As to Mara or desire, they are not evil. Rather than killing all desire, we must pursue sacred desire, evolutionary desire, not profane devolutionary desire. The origin of desire is in the Spirit which exists at the Zenith of the Soul. Nirvana and Enlightenment exist in the immanent Soul of man. The Soul is the Zenith of the Mind, but the Spirit is the Zenith of the Soul, and the Spirit has both immanent and transcendent qualities. As Buddha was a dweller in bliss in the Soul he was blocking out the activation of the Spirit's Will to Godhood.

A pampered prince sought the supreme pleasure and absence of pain of Nirvana first, and this way Buddha sought to end suffering. He did not concern himself much with religious and philosophical problems or the origin of the Kosmos, castes etc, all he cared about was ridding the body of suffering by ridding the body of desire so that he, and we, could dwell in bliss. We don't attain Godhood that way.

To truly reach the goal of all life in the Kosmos, while not just transcending human desires, we must evolve materially in the Kosmos far beyond man to Superman, Gods and Godhood. This is the Evolutionary Outward Path, which is our Twofold Path addition to the Involutionary Inward Path of Nirvana, or Heaven, which is sought by Buddhism, and other Revealed Religions. We set the spinning of the wheel of material evolution to Godhood, and not just to the Involutionary human world of Nirvana, although we affirm this too in the Inward Path.

Evolution and Christian Ethics

As we affirm free-enterprise restrained by Christian ethics (which would have prevented the latest financial bubble bursting), so we also affirm upward evolution restrained by Christian ethics. Although we include Beyondist ethics in  the Theoevolutionary Church , this makes us somewhat different than Cattell's Beyondism, which has moral constraints from science but not Christian constraints.

Conservatism, the middle way between reactionary and progressive, is the social template for this position. Radical change rarely works and usually does great damage. Christian ethics allow the stable societies in which evolution can take place. But evolution needs to be added to Christian ethics. The Inward Path of Christianity requires the Outward Path of  the Theoevolutionary Church