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11 October 2024
What am I trying to do with my writing project?
I can change this over time, if I want, but I thought I should write up what I think I'm doing and basically what I'm saying so far, and also consider where I might go in the future. I may revisit this next year around this time of year to see if anything has changed, if I remember.
This overview is largely based on things that I've written before, especially in Formulalessness. But some of the things in this overview, I've thought of recently and mostly haven't written about elsewhere.
This overview is based on my perspective now, what I think about now, and doesn't mention some things that I used to be into more. For a past overview, see the "categories of my writing" page I wrote while I was still working on Formulalessness.
I've been motivated by different desires. One is to pursue theistic apologetics. Apologetics works both to show the unbeliever why a religion is true, and to show religious people why a particular version of their religion is true. Or, to show people why they should believe God exists, and why a particular version of God is the one who exists.
Another is to understand civilizational development. Where are we headed as a civilization? What is the end of civilizational development?
Another is to promote the excellence of culture. How is it that we can be excellent people (however defined)? The kind of people who improve and/or actively maintain civilization so that it does not decline?
Related, both religious and civilizational, how can we be real, authentic people (for some definition of "real" and "authentic")? How can we live up to the minimum (high) standard for being human?
Perhaps I can unify all of these motivations into one description of my writing project:
As civilization develops, we face the prospect of losing, failing, dying -- what most people concerned about civilization seem to worry about. But what I worry about is, what if we succeed? What if we succeed badly, in such a way that we close ourselves off from what is really good, which, actually, is the minimum we should stop at?
We should seek a way to know what good and bad (or good and evil) really are, so that we actually know what we're doing when we try to progress as a civilization. How can we know what values to have? Perhaps we can try to understand the nature of morality itself (the standard of morality and its capacity to validate).
How can we know something about morality? Morality exists. It must be like all other existing things in the way that all existing things are the same (a nice philosophical sentence). Everything is made of consciousness. So morality is a conscious being. To contact conscious reality is to experience it. Morality experiences all that exists in order to validate it. Morality experiences, firsthand, all experience. Every unbearable pain is unbearable to it. For something to be unbearable, it must be rejected at some point. Unbearable sensations (painful or otherwise), it must reject. So we know that unbearability is evil / bad (rejected by morality). But we don't know all of what is unbearable to morality. Morality could choose to cease to validate the very existence of any given thing and that thing would cease to exist. (Existing involves a certain amount of validity, and to exist requires that something has that amount of validity.) So morality has the power, knowledge, and sensitivity of God, and is good -- goodness itself. If a being we might take to be God exists and is not identical with this being, it is not really God. (This paragraph develops a natural theology, finding God in nature rather than revelation.)
So God exists, now what? We would seek to know more about God. Perhaps traditional religions contain revelation from God. After developing my natural theology further, it turns out that there's a decent chance that the Bible comes from God. Although we don't know that the Bible is inerrant (and we have reason to suspect that it's not), we also can't rule out the possibility that it contains real information from God, and we should (carefully and thoughtfully) try to obey it. (I have not seriously looked into all the other scriptures, but suspect that the Bible (we'll say, something like the 66 book Protestant canon, although I haven't read the Catholic or Orthodox deuterocanons) will end up being the most recommended by my natural theology.) While there is a decent, although necessarily somewhat unspecifiable, chance that the Bible contains useful information from God, it's uncertain, and our primary obligation is to obey God in our preferences, actions, and trustings based on natural theology, which is more certain. (Without having done all the work to relate my natural theology to the Bible, I think the Bible mostly adds to without having to conflict with my natural theology.) (For an introduction to my natural theology, see MSL.)
The thing that made me think that I should try to have my own intellectual project was the discovery of the New Wine System, an interpretation of the Bible developed by Philip Brown. It is more than just a container of the following ideas, but these were the ones that I found most interesting: 1. We must become completely holy before going to heaven. 2. This is significantly up to us to complete, such that there is a real danger we will not (something we truly could choose to not complete). 3. There is a long, finite period of time after this life and before heaven (in the New Wine System, the Millennium / Resurrection), for us to complete this process of becoming holy. Additionally, there is the danger that you will harden yourself on a level of holiness less than complete, through complacency and self-satisfaction, so that possessing virtue could be bad for you if it tempts you to not keep being hungry for righteousness. Having more time to develop doesn't help you if you use it to harden yourself, or fail to unharden yourself. If you harden yourself and never unharden, someday you will reject God and he will have to destroy you, because you will (in your unholiness) be unbearable to him. (This basic theology, whether "New Wine" (biblically rooted) or "MSL" (philosophically rooted) I call "voluntary millennial holiness".)
(MSL says morality (God) can't stand what is immoral forever, yet that morality values what is valuable and so tries to preserve you if possible (i.e., if you will allow it), giving you an opportunity (like a long, finite period of time) to come to agree with it. Thus MSL leads into VMH.)
VMH may sound somewhat like Roman Catholicism or Mormonism, and it has some resemblance. (Possibly also to Eastern Orthodoxy, which I haven't looked into as much.) But I don't think Catholicism or Mormonism (and I suspect also not Eastern Orthodoxy), even if technically similar, strike the note that I think follows from VMH, which is one more similar to very logically consistent evangelicalism, a kind of urgent concern for the eternal well-being of others, with a sense of danger or even the horror of choosing wrong. However, unlike that kind of evangelicalism, VMH does not focus primarily on conversion, but rather the whole process of becoming holy, including conversion. Also, because of the Millennium (from the Bible's "1,000 years"), humans have a much longer, though still finite, amount of time to become holy, than the amount of time allowed to come to conversion (this life of maybe 80 years length) under traditional evangelicalism. So while traditional evangelicalism can be sometimes strange, unhealthy, and overly focused on conversion, due to the urgency of saving people in the 80 (or fewer) years they have in this life, this urgency is somewhat diluted in VMH. And VMH emphasizes holiness, not just conversion, a remedy of one of traditional evangelicalism's potential weaknesses, where people are converted but don't develop Christian character.
VMH is tolerant of other religions without ignoring its own truth claims. The truth matters, and one religion can be right while others are wrong. But if VMH is true, we can find out in the next life (Millennium) what is true. Believing the wrong doctrines is not necessarily a ticket to hell, unlike in traditional evangelicalism. However, not being open-minded (such that you can't be corrected in the next life about who God is), not being morally excellent (arguably MSL's and VMH's definitions of moral excellence overlap significantly with most religions'), and having a bad attitude about morality and the process of becoming morally excellent, are things that perhaps a serious practitioner of any of the major religions could find objectionable, and which VMH finds objectionable, and these are things that a "VMHer" would hope to "anti-tempt" others away from even if it's not realistic that they adopt VMH (MSL, the New Wine System) themselves in this life.
The essence of holiness is in the heart, not in behavior, but bad behavior hurts God even if a person's heart is good. Controlling behavior may have some short-term value (certainly it allows civilization to function, as when police apprehend people who have committed crimes). But controlling behavior does not change the heart. Being too controlling causes people to rebel and turn against the values of those who control. So VMHers have an incentive to try to minimize controlling others, rather preferring to "anti-tempt" them (like tempting, but with a different spirit, and producing an attraction to God, rather than temptation's product, sin and enmity toward God).
In VMH, there are aspects of the pursuit of holiness that are 100% under God's control (whether he trusts you, and if our bodies are essential to who we are in some sense, the cleansing of our bodies so we no longer have sinful instincts, since a sinful thought that occurs to you against your will (presumably from your body / brain instincts) is one that is still unbearable to God). But one aspect that God has no power over, that is 100% up to you, is your heart, your free willed intentions, preferences, identity, etc. So, God is not really literally omnipotent, although in a sense he is, because he can't let you be you and still make you do exactly what he wants. God is significantly at our mercy and at the mercy of how we are willing to trust him. Religion is shaped by our sense of what is admirable or trustworthy, and through religion we trust God, the version of God that we can trust.
God endures our sinfulness and our suffering, and has done so for century after century. It is as raw for him as it ever was, because he sees things as they are in themselves (his patience is "longsuffering", not an insensitivity or deferral of emotion). God endures our rejection of him. He is not necessarily alone among holy beings, but unrequited love can always be hard to bear, and hard to bear for someone who sees and feels things as they really are. So, understanding this, we feel empathy for God, and this should lead to us seeking to eliminate our enmity toward him, in all parts of us.
So we are to become "ethical theists", those who are ethically oriented toward God's interests and well-being, just as there are "ethical humanists", those who are ethically oriented toward the interests and well-being of humans.
The most striking Christian image is of Jesus on the cross, suffering every second of it. Similarly, in MSL, a striking image is of God, the sustainer of the universe, suffering continually from the beginning of sin until now.
Much of God's suffering comes from human free will making evil choices. We have to have a real choice between good and evil (good normally looking so clearly good) in order to deeply love the good by rejecting evil. This choice is provided by temptation, which can't be willed by God himself, who is too holy. So other beings will our temptation, and only evil beings would do so. They have some power over God because they can negotiate what their "wages" will be for willing our temptation. They negotiate for the world to be worse than what God would really like it to be. Evil beings are active in the world and sometimes active in our lives.
I imagine that "MSLians" (and perhaps other "VMHers") would be people who mourn, see horror, are patient and yet also have urgency in them, are active, have a long-term view, are tolerant yet truth-oriented, are serious, not inclined to control others, ideally healthy where health is a servant to holiness, and ideally concerned rather than anxious.
Philip Brown (IIRC) expressed the idea that New Wine Christians should not form a denomination, or that it would be best if they didn't. I feel that MSLians might go into different contexts, like different churches or other social scenes, as something like missionaries, whose base of support would be some kind of probably online or possibly local group of MSLians, not attempting to make a large "safe space" of a church with building and pastor, but still some kind of support group, while primarily living their lives in other cultures. This seems like the most realistic structure (at least, as opposed to having a traditional congregation) with low numbers of MSLians. It might be best for MSLians to not form imposing structures (not organized denominations, parachurch ministries, or maybe even conventional congregations) so that they can be as unthreatening as possible when embedded in social settings that do not share their beliefs, as de facto missionaries.
How would these people and their beliefs intersect with the future of civilization?
How will civilization end? One possibility is with "death" (the permanent decline of civilization). Although wiping out the entire human race is difficult, perhaps that could even occur. The other possibility, is "sustainability": Humans live within the means of their planet, not consuming resources faster than they can be renewed. They have societies that are stable enough that civilization neither dies out nor starts to consume resources unsustainably.
Other than this, civilization on Earth will mutate, grow, and shrink, and grow again, over and over, until it settles into one of those two forms of stability.
But humans could extend themselves beyond Earth. This, in an attempt to avoid death, and to multiply sentient life far beyond what one planet can sustain.
If MSL is correct, though, what's really important is that each person who comes into existence has a good chance of making it to heaven. God can always create more people. It is better to preserve the civilization that you have, because civilizations are painful things for God to develop (assuming that God likes civilizations for some kind of moral progress they embody -- or, that they are containers of good teachings that seem to need time to become "trustable"). But, just as the Millennium gives you a second lease on life, God can resurrect civilization, allowing more children to be born in case not enough were born under our watch.
While it's not necessarily bad to go "to the stars", it's not necessary. And, every settlement that comes from us will still have to face "sustainability or death".
"Sustainability" means to arrive at a social system that doesn't change outside of certain limits. If there is something seriously wrong with a social system, that doesn't threaten the system's persistence, then there is the danger of a "bad sustainability". A vivid example is a dystopia, like that of Nineteen Eighty-Four. A similarly vivid example is a "dyseutopia", a superficially good society that is actually bad (arguably Brave New World fits the bill). Generally, we see Nineteen Eighty-Four as undesirable (some dictator-type people might disagree), and similarly with Brave New World (some transhumanists might disagree). Dictator-type people and transhumanists are relatively uncommon at least as of 2024, and perhaps the political process will marginalize and limit them over time. But two cultures that are currently very popular are what I might call "ordinary humanism" (secular, non-technophilic humanism) and "ordinary Christianity". Both of these have humans having normal families, the cycle of life, do not seek to transcend human biology, and they are relatively reasonable, humane, accommodating to many different types of people, are both fairly conservative compared to transhumanism. Many people are happy with one or the other "ordinary" ideology, or in some sense with both. But these things are actually "mediocre" (good, or seemingly good, things that keep you from what you really need), carrying complacency and small-scale sin. So an MSLian would find them to be dyseutopias, if they became locked in as the final culture or cultures. They would be more dangerous than they appeared.
MSLians would want to guard against that. They might do so by radiating the lived values of excellence. They might also work to promote the idea that we haven't necessarily reached the ideal end. That a sustainability without the ability for an outsider to correct it is dangerous.
MSLians might make good maintainers of civilization. They believe something important is at stake, as long as we may still harden on sin. In principle, anything in the secular world could have some effect on whether people harden on sin. MSLians would have the life or death motivation to care about society as people settled into both a religious and secular complacency, as their secular needs, and thus their psychological needs, were satisfied. MSLians, then, might be prominent in whatever parts of culture actively work to maintain civilization. (I suspect that entrepreneurial-level innovation-like thinking is sometimes required to keep a complex system from running down.) MSLians could then always keep themselves open to whatever outsiders might show to be a more trustworthy way to go. Maybe outsider advice could be integrated smoothly into a sustainable system without destroying it, preserving sustainability?
I see our civilization as beginning to enter its Ecclesiastes phase. The author of Ecclesiastes seems to have been a highly civilized, advanced, experienced human being. He looks back on his life at all the things he's tried and finds everything "vain / vaporous". All that's left in the end is God. This, I periodically feel in myself, for all of society, and I think it is connected to my MSL beliefs. Some forms of art may have hit the point where it's largely the case that within them there is nothing new being made. The author of Ecclesiastes may have been wrong in some sense when he said there was "nothing new under the sun", but maybe he was just premature, and we will hit that point culturally. At some point, maybe now, but if not now, sometime in the future, we will have all of our options available. We will have metal, punk, and goth; cubism, Impressionism, and the styles of da Vinci and Rembrandt; Mac, Windows, Linux; Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the atheistic explorations; and so on, with all the smaller variants and examples of these categories, and other categories like them. Then we can decide, which of these things we have experimented with are the ones we want to repeat to ourselves, like an old man reading his favorite books rather than new ones, as we settle into our millennia-long cultural twilight, potentially the period of time in which most people who will ever live will live. (Maybe every generation when it's young explores all the diversity as if it's new, but they know that it's all been done before and nothing changes anything really.)
So VMHers (MSLians and New Wine Christians) might act as preservative agents that guide culture away from catastrophic ends and toward excellent ones, guiding our civilization into its best old age. Then, after people die and are resurrected to the Millennium, VMHers will work as "pastors" or "prophets", as they have in this life.
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What are some future directions for my writing that I can see?
My current project is to understand philosophy better in general, and specifically so that I can extend and defend MSL. I could see this taking the rest of my life, maybe. I could hand off some of the task to someone else, in theory, but probably still need to do it, so that I understand what they (or critics) say and can comment on it, as the "author"/"authority" of my own project.
Working on philosophy could naturally lead me to consider the question of the future. (The future is something philosophy can talk about.) I'm not the best with empirical / research-based work, so I probably should not work alone if I get into futurism. Futurism might include figuring out what physical sustainability would require at various levels of civilizational sophistication, and then working from that "backward" to the present, to see pathways to sustainability, then imagine how MSL might fit into that and keep it excellent. Or it could involve working "forward" from the present, looking at how cultures evolve over time, to see how to try not to drift into bad futures. Probably both "forward" and "backward" approaches are necessary.
The Bible is a relevant book to MSL, but how do the two relate? Specifically, if we fuse MSL and the Bible, who is God? And if the Bible contains information about God (which I won't assume can't be mixed in with information not from God), how do we obey the Bible given the risk that any particular commandment isn't really from him? I have already begun a project in that vein, and I do think it's within my ability to do myself, if I say it's okay to simply consider an English translation, rather than getting into all the scholarship that could be brought to bear. But it would take a lot of time, nonetheless. Somebody should do the task, and since I've already started, I have some ideas about how to do it, but it may not be something I should really take the lead on.
My focus has largely been on Christianity and atheism in the West, especially America. I feel like I have a handle on that (not that I get all of any of those things, but I just feel basically comfortable making statements there because I grew up in that context). As attractive as they may be, non-Western national and religious cultures are not something I feel comfortable with, since I did not grow up in them. Relating VMH and MSL to those contexts is not for me, unless somehow I finish all the previous tasks and no one else has taken up the non-Western task other than me.