10 April 2026
Since my last post, I have a few things to report. I have continued studying Indonesian (working through Hantarto Widjaja's epic 4,637 word vocabulary list, which is almost like a great novel, maybe Moby-Dick, for its texture, themes, and sense of adventure). Waiting for Margot was not selected as a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Prize. I spent my time dealing with computer maintenance and some minor but absorbing health issues.
I also listened to the radio a lot, the greatest share to the local NPR station (KPBS), but also conservative and Christian AM talk radio, two Los Angeles stations (KNX and KFI), and once, at night, a conservative talk radio station in the Bay Area, along with some music stations in San Diego and occasionally in Mexico.
I decided to change different things, one of which is that I'm trying to draft what I write (more often) using pen and paper.
I read some novels. Currently reading A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, his memoir covering becoming president of the US, and the majority of his first term.
I see in these last few months an emphasis on news media and politics, which I think is one ingredient in where I'm going next. The other note being fiction. So I am considering the two projects of analysis of news and fiction from an MSL/VMH perspective.
23 April 2026
I find myself beginning to see problems with extended MSL, and also the motivation to fix them. So it's time to start making "patches" of it. These are not necessarily as high-quality as Formulalessness and previous Following posts. With those, I tended to try to think through everything I could, really engaging my brain. But my brain is tired now, and will not lift burdens the same way. However, hopefully these patches help answer some questions (even if they open up new ones). I don't see myself going at a rapid pace in fixing things, and I don't intend to push myself to look for flaws, for instance by re-reading previous posts of the blog. If you think you find a flaw, see my page for MSL problems and solutions, which has a link for submitting problems.
24 April 2026
I have had a hard time identifying myself as a Christian, over the last few years. Identity is not necessarily about truth. My views on the truth of Christianity are basically the same as in Formulalessness. I think philosophy suggests the Bible may be true, with some force. It supports some distinctively Christian doctrines. Exactly how true this makes Christianity, I haven't done the work to say. I don't rely on the Bible or the truth as independent authorities. But identity is more about, would I vote for Christianity if it was on the ballot. Or, am I on "team Christianity"? Notably, for me to do this, I have to make the scenario in which the truth says Christianity is untrue, and I identify with that fact, somehow part of Christian identity. I don't want to abandon the truth, whatever it is, and I think overall that is the wrong thing to do.
I have been comfortable saying "I would be classified as a Christian by non-Christians" (perhaps by scholars of religion). But until now, I have not been comfortable saying I was a Christian. Most Christians are not willing to say they are Christians if "being Christian" can mean just anything. Here are two conditions (there may be more I'm not aware of in this moment) which, if satisfied, allow me to say I'm a Christian, a version of Christianity I would vote for, whether it turned out to be true or not. These conditions are in contrast to my overall experience of the Christian world I've participated in. (Probably there are conditions I would make that I'm less aware of, which were assumed by that world.)
1. Christianity as a form of Judaism. I'm not primarily interested in things like obeying the Mosaic law, more so here the mentality of people living in exile, particularly their ability to see, conceive of, remember, and talk about unhappiness, mourning, defeat, and tragedy, as well as patience and survival, the ability to keep going despite not winning. Christianity as contrasted with Judaism lends itself to triumphalism and toxic positivity. Also, there is a distinctive but not necessarily good element to Christianity which can be seen in cultures that put grace over repentance. This keeps people mired in sinfulness longer than necessary and multiplies victims. I see less of this in Judaism. An extreme (that is, logically consistent) version of this grace culture is Calvinism, another one universalism, both of which VMH contradicts. (Though God is on "team universalism", the reality is that not everyone will necessarily be saved.)
2. Christianity as truth. The previous condition, I've been aware of for some time, but this is the new one that seems to put me over the line. Christianity can be seen as a family religion. For many, or most, it is. But when it was new, it was about truth. The truth is what it is -- may validate your existing beliefs, which hold together your community, or not. Christianity as truth opposes the practice of believing what you do because it is what the people you like believe. It is dangerous -- potentially alienating and producing conflict. Christianity as truth says "question Christianity" -- if it's true, then so much the better for it. Yet it also says "commit to Christianity if it's true", commit not to questioning, but to true belief and the process of seeking true belief. It says that Christianity needs to be good (in a good form) according to reality (God, and people's real situations), not according to definitions of goodness agreed on by the church (or by the secular world, for that matter). (Since "Christianity as truth" is a new thought to me, I may be leaving something out, but I think that's enough to get started.)
What do I do with this Christian identity? I'm not sure. I probably won't change much anytime soon, except feel more comfortable saying I'm a Christian.
27 April 2026
I gave up on this book partway through (toward the end of the first of two roughly equal-length parts). I did not maintain the momentum needed to get through. (The book has no chapters, just the two parts, and the prose is 19th century, not optimized for 21st century readability. I probably wouldn't have had a problem with it if I had read it straight through, but I found I couldn't pick it back up after a while off, had lost connection to what was going on.) From what I read, though, I recommend it.
According to the introduction by Adam Gopnik in the edition I read (2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition), the good characters (an altruistic secret society) are not believable. But perhaps the book is a form of speculative fiction, where human nature is like the ray guns or Mars of science fiction, the subject of speculation. Someday we may walk on Mars, someday unbelievable good characters may be real.
One moment was strangely good and recommended Balzac as a skilled writer. A character is seen as good and bad, back and forth, as more information is revealed.
The book discusses the backstories of its altruistic characters, showing how some altruistic people may come to altruism.
For all this, I will recommend this book, but only provisionally, since I quit partway through.
06 May 2026
I thought about it and decided not to pursue either the news or fiction analysis projects. I think I will take in the news, and read fiction, casually.
I'm reading The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham and have a few more books I might read. Perhaps I will add a philosophy book to the list.
06 May 2026
"That which exists should exist, unless it is sin" -- an MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle. This is a reason people are supposed to live forever, unless they wed themselves to sin permanently. Does this mean that every entity will live forever, as long as it's not sin? Every glimmer of light, every gust of wind, every speck of dust, every line at the grocery store?
Yes -- but, for impersonal beings, to be can be exhausted by being remembered. As long as God remembers them, they exist. Whereas for personal beings (humans, spirits, many or all animals), to be requires the ability to exercise free will.
A line at the grocery store, or a garden party, or the excited moment when an election is called, are things made up of personal beings. Do they exist just by being remembered? I think so. Does your past self exist as anything other than memory? I would say, no. So then those ephemeral personal states exist (once they have happened), as memory, and all they need to continue being is to be remembered.
I've said (IIRC) that God's memory is static, like frames of a film. So the gust of wind from yesterday does not exist in the sense that he necessarily experiences it blowing all the time. But it does exist in a suspended state, like we do when we sleep.
What about heaven? In extended MSL, the existence of heaven (as in, the final state of rest for God and those in tune with him) is everlasting, but only because God erases its contents periodically to free up experience bubbles. This destroys at least some entities (glimmers of light, I would presume). This is necessary for personal beings to be able to exercise, act out, their free will. Perhaps another MSLian metaphysical/ethical principle is that "The impersonal exists to serve the personal". The glimmers of light in heaven exist to serve the personal beings who see them, so that the personal beings can live. Some people need glimmers of light to be who they are (their final identities include being poets, cinematographers, or illustrators, for instance). Eating plants, building things out of metal and wood, etc. is OK. The glimmers of light can be "eaten" (annihilated for the purpose of a personal being). Further, impersonal beings are just part of some or many personal beings, likely God if no one else. (In that every object is an experience experienced by a person, and thus is part of their experience body.) For a personal being to change in what they are in heaven is OK. (So the metaphysical/ethical principle is "Change is OK if it is not change into sin".)
An animist might see in plants, even in metal, some kind of spirit of its own, apart from a human, angel, demon, God, etc. Extended MSL may not be able to rule that out. However, we might say that even if pieces of metal have spirits, glimmers of light don't. We would just suppose that the number of personal beings was considerably bigger than previously supposed. (Personal identity: when does the material in a piece of metal receive the spirit and thus really become a piece of metal? If you melt two pieces of metal together, do you get one spirit? Personal identity in extended MSL might be worth discussing elsewhere, although I don't plan to pursue it unless doing so helps deal with a problem I become aware of in extended MSL.) However, I think that if you go far enough in saying that things that you can sensorily or noetically see must all have their own spirits, are all personal beings, you eventually get to a point where you can create spirits just by, for instance, counting higher than anyone else has counted (bringing new numbers into being). If you do this enough in heaven, you might create spirits that didn't exist before heaven started, and eventually if people (or pieces of metal) do this enough, there will not be enough experience bubbles left to keep heaven going, assuming you can't destroy sinless spirits.
Possible workarounds: the obvious one is that animism must have its limits. Much of the spirit in the natural (or noetic) world, which some would call impersonal, but which animists see as personal, is really God. He is the spirit of the trees, metal, and glimmers of light. Another thought is that there are a finite number of spirits, but they are incarnated in multiple forms over time. Possibly, when a dog dies, its spirit sleeps until entering into a new dog body. Another possibility is that things that are very numerous, like ants, or numbers, have one spirit (maybe one per ant colony, and one for all conceived-of integers, one for all conceived-of real numbers, etc., or just one for all conceived-of numbers of any sort), this spirit connecting to many bodies. When we conceive of a number no one ever has before, perhaps it is the case that the number spirit grows a new limb, which is just a new part of it, not a new spirit.
(I see myself using "metaphysical/ethical" -- in MSL, to be is to ought to be, and thus metaphysics can be about "what God should do with reality, and will, if possible".)
(There could be a "finite/ethical" problem (a problem for finite personal beings, not a metaphysical/ethical problem for the Universal being), around knowing which things we're allowed to use, which are really impersonal. We should do our best with the evidence we have, I guess -- this is more or less an empirical problem. Weird outcome of this idea: we might think it's a bit more likely that plants have spirits than chemicals do, and replace our vegan diets with chemicals.)
06 May 2026
Living enables repentance. Those who get insufficient time to live may have insufficient time to complete their repentance. If you die at age 5, you don't get as much time in this life as someone who dies at age 80. You get the 1,000 years of the Millennium just as they do, but the lost 75 years is significant (if there's literally 1,000 years, that's about 7% of the time you could have had).
That's (I think) about how I say things are in Formulalessness. But it occurs to me, maybe God would just give people who die at age 5 a head start on the Millennium. They could be resurrected 75 years earlier than those who live to be 80.
On first inspection, this looks rational, and I'm not sure why God wouldn't do that (or enact some other plan that also gives people time to make up for dying young).
Any problem just saying that? It takes away somewhat from the moral weight of working to prolong people's lives. It's still good to help people live longer if your brain is part atheist as I think is the case with many believers -- the atheist in you doesn't believe people live beyond this life. (Or maybe you aren't an atheist, but like the author of Ecclesiastes, you are a theist who believes that there is no afterlife.) It's also good to practice respect for that which exists, which should continue existing forever unless it is sin. (That opens the question of "does that mean that gusts of wind, specks of dust, garden parties, and other small and ephemeral things should last forever?" -- something to consider in another post.)
(This leaves aside purely deontological issues like, suppose murder or failing to help people live longer just are wrong -- somehow we know that. Extended MSL does factor in deontology. The thing that we need to maximize (consequentialism) -- holiness -- contains deontology in it, which may be known, at least to a significant degree. This knowledge of what deontology demands or recommends is not something I think I can necessarily derive from the first principles of extended MSL, but there are a lot of real things that I can't derive that way, which must be known through some kind of other observation. Likewise there are pragmatic concerns: how can you have a society with murder, or without people helping each other live longer?)
The Bible (I think, maybe) makes it sound like everyone is resurrected at once. At least, that's the impression remaining in my brain from when I read about this topic in New Wine for the End Times. So if that's the case, that would be a reason to think that people who die young get less time to develop spiritually than those who live a "full" number of years.
The Bible seems to give some support to the idea that there can be some kind of "awakeness" after death but before the Resurrection, at least in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Maybe both the rich man and Lazarus died before age 80? (Or whatever age is the real standard.) So then they got some time to catch up, before going back to "sleep", awaiting the Resurrection.
The way that all makes it sound, it sounds unlikely, but still maybe possible, that people won't have their lifespans corrected by getting extra time before the Resurrection, or something like that. (I can't think of a reason from extended MSL, and I can think of reasons for and against from the Bible, given above). In case it still matters, it lends some weight to the idea that extending people's lives gives them a better chance of being saved from hell, and thus some additional weight on acting like that's true. There are other reasons for acting that way (respecting the preservation of personal beings, behaving like a good atheist since in a way we often tend to be atheists / non-afterlife theists, and deontology).
06 May 2026
For finite beings (like us) our experience bodies (the total of what we can experience, affecting and being affected thereby) is (as far as I know, for humans at least) one experience bubble (unit of unified experience, what we can see, hear, smell, touch, taste, intuit, and imagine at once in the present moment). But in theory it could be more than one, if some finite being can experience in more than 3+1 dimensions. It could be possible to experience two 3+1 dimensional experience bubbles if there is a fourth dimension to separate and hold in the same frame the two 3+1 dimensional bubbles. The Universal person's experience body consists of multiple experience bubbles (one for each creature's experience bubble / experience body, plus a number of others, for instance to be an effective Speaker and Universal person of Legitimacy).
I feel like I have sometimes used "experience body" to refer to "experience bubble" -- a warning. Hopefully the right meaning can be inferred from context.
11 May 2026
Recently I suggested that God would give everyone an extension on the Millennium if they didn't happen to get a full life on earth in this life. I thought there was nothing in extended MSL against it. But I was forgetting two principles: evil beings could negotiate against that outcome, and God might allow the risk to exist because we need to take some responsibility for the salvation of others. Some things are guaranteed by God, and some aren't, and this extension may go either way.
It can't be the case that at creation you get no chance to be saved, so we must have some kind of Millennium, since very few if any of us are holy enough for heaven at the end of this life. We have to live some amount of time. Missing out on a little bit of life (a bit, or even a lot, of our ~80 years) might be allowed by God. Whereas missing out on a lot (a lot of our 1,000 years, if that is literally how much time we get in the Millennium) would not be allowed by God. I suppose this means that fairness may not be guaranteed, but (significant) opportunity is.
23 July 2026
It now seems like a good idea for me to do fiction analysis. The project I have in mind is to try to describe what "MSLian fiction" would look like if it existed. Detective fiction is about detectives, professionals who can be outsiders to the case they take on (maybe usually are), who intervene in others' life stories (of victims, perpetrators, falsely accused, and the legal system). MSLians as well are professional outsiders, dropped into various contexts.
Why do this project now? Like Dostoyevsky and Balzac, I pay my debts with words. I don't worry about money, like they did, but writing helps me promote myself. I find a poverty in me toward most forms of seeking attention and social connection. But a relative wealth in me of writing, which can feed those functions. This project, specifically, helps me to solicit attention from literary people.
It occurs to me that literary people may make my best audience. (I didn't really think of this until very recently.) At least, they might, for a few reasons. One is that everything I write is at least a bit literary (my non-fiction may on a low level sometimes not seem literary, but if taken as a whole it is, I think). My voice is more "literary" than it is "analytic philosophy". People follow, trust, and distrust voices as much as content. I think the "analytic philosophy people" (such as philosophy of religion people and effective altruists) might not be able to trust what I do because of its literary dimensions. Also, I feel like for philosophy fans, I might seem like a lightweight, or like I haven't jumped through the hoops necessary to convince them, whereas for literary people, my writing is adequate in "perfection" (in the sense of "fullness", being completed enough to be a literary work).
The most obvious audience for my writing is religious people, of course, because religion is more central to my writing than being literary and philosophical. However, religious people, often, the more serious they are as people, the more invested they are in their current religions. So the very people who are most resonant with religious language, and most ethically serious, may be among the most natural opponents of MSL. Literary people may at least find value in my writing, though many might not be interested in joining a religion.
Something new to me about this project is the feeling of ambivalence I have toward it. My previous writing ventures have all felt clearly necessary, or sometimes if less necessary, at least clearly OK and desirable to work on. But this (after two days at it) feels like a job, something I really don't feel like doing, but which I show up to, my brain warmed up to it, fortunately so far not burning out on it. There are other things I would rather be doing, and I think when my social situation permits it, that is likely what I'll switch to.
23 July 2026
The philosophy in this seems valid, but I haven't thought it through.
Why is there evil in the world? Why?
"Why?" can be asked to find out facts, to build a worldview. It can also be asked as a cry of the heart.
Is there a pat answer for why there is evil in the world, an intellectually satisfying one? Perhaps. I think so. All it takes is for God to have to negotiate with evil beings, and for beings to have the free will to be evil.
Yet, the cry of the heart remains. And then I question some more. Is there ever really a reason for why free-willed beings choose evil? Free will is not determined by reasons. No, all free choices of evil are done for no reason. Similarly, all free choices of good are done for no reason. But the heart does not cry out "why" about the free choices of good, so there tends not to be the unanswered question "Why is there good in the world? Why?".
18 August 2026
Reading this post by Joseph Rahi, I was reminded by him of Nietzsche's idea that philosophies reflect the personalities of the philosophers who come up with them or espouse them. Rahi describes the links between his personality and his philosophy. MSL does reflect some of my tastes and values, which I had before developing it. Could Rahi (or any number of other people with various philosophical tastes) ever accept MSL, or would it simply not interest them, not appeal to them to even think about? Maybe they would think about it from a conversation online which forced them to consider it for a time, think about it a bit, but never really get into it.
I can't change MSL much (without making it something it's not), but I think it might be possible to at least bridge some of this aesthetic and gustatory gap by a project of explicit interrelationship with the philosophies of the world. For instance, literally writing footnotes to Plato (in the text of a public domain ebook, perhaps) from an MSLian perspective, or footnotes to Aristotle, Plotinus, etc. all the way down to the present. What would be the MSL response to the distinction between formal, material, efficient, and final causes? To non-cognitivism? To questions about the authenticity of the self? To Platonic Forms? To what extent must these things be argued against by MSL, and to what extent can they be folded into it?
I don't think I have the brain for this right now, but someone who liked philosophy and was into MSL could work on something like this. The benefit would be to reach a philosophically literate audience (for each philosopher, a subset of their audience), which is a niche audience, but I think that MSL could specialize in niche audiences, rather than only trying to reach a large number of people, and as MSL is based in a natural theology, the philosophically literate (thus philosophically formed, educated, opinionated, and even prejudiced) may end up being a big part of those who adopt MSL.
18 August 2026
With the luxury of foresight (where I can imagine anything, since nothing has happened), I see a potential for "men's MSL" and "women's MSL". I wouldn't use these terms, since I don't want to be the one to institute a gendered expression of MSL, but they are inherited from Leila Ahmed's "men's Islam" and "women's Islam" (from her memoir A Border Passage). For her, "women's Islam" comes about because women did not go to the main mosque meetings, didn't hear the sermons, and generally didn't study the various official Islamic texts. Some, but not all, men did. So while the men focused on what the texts said, the women focused on what they remembered of the Quran, discussing it with each other as they tried to understand their lives, dealing with the problems that their various relationships presented to them. This Islam "stresses moral conduct and emphasizes Islam as a broad ethos and ethical code and as a way of understanding and reflecting on the meaning of one's life and of human life more generally." (p. 125 of the paperback edition from 2000, in ch. 5)
My interpretation: "men's religion" is about law, structure, doctrine, and apologetics. "What is the content of texts?", defending texts, proving which text is correct. Defending the flag, the beliefs, the culture, from those who might deceitfully or violently oppose them. Whereas, in my interpretation, "women's religion" takes some kind of text as given (in Ahmed's world, the remembered Quran, but perhaps similarly in Christian contexts the remembered Bible) and then tries to live according to it, its practitioners adjusting their understanding of the text as necessary because of what it takes to live it in the particulars of life.
I think that my writing up until now has often emphasized "men's MSL", certainly that's broadly what Formulalessness and the MSL and VMH booklets are all about. But resonance with something like "women's MSL" I think is more common among people. It occurs to me that perhaps better, less-gendered names for the two are "epistemic MSL" (what do we believe? what should we believe? let's believe it) and "ethical MSL" (what is the right thing to do? how should we do it? let's do it). Some minds are given to abstraction and learning, while others are given to action. I have been hesitant to be the one to write "how-tos" for MSL, largely because deep understanding (of MSL beliefs and the way the world works) should enable anyone to act in as MSLian a way as they could. To follow a how-to without understanding doesn't work in the long run, as how-tos become obsolete and to correct them requires your own contact with reality, and how-tos that are adequate for someone with the wisdom to interpret them correctly may not be adequate for those who have not built up their understanding, but who may naively try to work them as formulas anyway.
"Women's Islam" sounds like it involves a social, conversational form of building understanding. I can imagine someday MSLians meeting together, when they meet for mutual support, talking over their lives, the people groups they're embedded in, how things are going in their lives as missionaries and in the lives of those they find themselves sent to. What is the right thing to do? What is the MSLian thing to do? What is the MSLian worldview? Holistic tendencies in me want the "men's religion" to be integrated with the "women's religion". "Worldview" is a "men's" term, yet worldview is at least implicit in "women's" reasoning.
"Women's religion" can be very textual, in one sense. A book club involves talking over life stories -- fictional, in the case of a novel. I see a parallel between reading fiction or memoir and discussing it in a group and the discussions between the female family members of Ahmed, where they discuss the problems in the lives of their family members and servants. Book club members sometimes engage in moral analysis, and could easily try to imagine themselves in situations like those of the protagonists of the books they read. Perhaps the literary world is a textual equivalent or expression of "women's religion" (or "ethical religion"), while philosophical, theological, and political texts relate to "men's religion" (or "epistemic religion").
(Literary criticism could be on either side of the "women's/men's" divide, sometimes about the text, and sometimes about life.)
Reading texts of narratives, particularly realistic, contemporary ones (although not necessarily exclusively those), and discussing them, as though they are real situations that MSLians must enter into, could be a "ethical religious" MSLian practice.
MSL so far is mostly locked up in philosophy. Many people can't or don't want to digest philosophy. (I can sympathize.) But narrative (even containing philosophy, if properly digested), is easier for people to take in. The Bible is much more successful than the Summa Theologiae. The Summa is considered a nice addition to the Bible, but the Bible is necessary and prior. But with MSL, the opposite is the case. The philosophy comes first -- so what is there for narrative? I've considered reading MSL into the Bible, and maybe someday I will. But it may be just as appropriate to develop the narrative side of MSL using contemporary texts.
I feel that my MSLian literary analysis project, as much as I've done so far, is turning out to be a kind of monologue version of an MSLian book club, an "ethical MSL" project. I wouldn't want it to be a replacement for such a thing (not a replacement for various MSLians talking over narratives themselves), nor am I totally at ease thinking about how it might end up being a bit too much of a "how to" in some sense. But I may need to keep writing so that I have material that might interest readers, and I guess I will have to live with the fact that I'm at least somewhat treading into "how to" territory.
I suppose all kinds of ethical and practical things could be written by MSLians, and generally speaking, I wouldn't object to them being written. But if I write something related to MSL, it's likely to be seen as being more official than what someone else writes in that space. Perhaps it's self-evident that, for a religion based in reason, things that (truly) follow from first principles are more solid (and thus naturally official) than things that involve guesswork, personal experience, and so on, which others might more validly question from their own, different perspectives. Literary analysis involves seeing things in a human way, not in the alien way of philosophy, to see with your self, and to guess what it's like to be someone else (someone you have never been). I could at least put a disclaimer on my literary analysis project saying that what I'm writing there is not meant to be official, the less it is rooted in some kind of more or less rigorous philosophy.
Is it then the case that an epistemic (or "men's") religion is superior to an ethical (or "women's") one, since philosophy is more official than narrative writing? One could say that the epistemic should be deferred to in epistemic matters, and the ethical in ethical matters. But even the ethical has something to say to epistemic questions, since knowledge of the particular, practical, embodied, etc. is knowledge. (I think it's obvious that the epistemic should inform the ethical in what the ethical does.) Philosophy has its strong points (talking about universals) and its weak points (talking about particulars, talking about human life). I don't know how to prove the existence of God using narrative, something which I think philosophy is capable of. On the other hand, knowing what it's like to be God requires a more narrative type of thinking. Generally, philosophy is good at providing some kinds of information, while narrative is good at providing other kinds. Life without narrative is a "mistake", but so is life without philosophy.
(The guesswork and personal perspective of ethical religious thinking is part of what's good about it. You are the one who guesses, and your perspective is called into question as you use it to make sense of other people and their situations. It changes you in a way that sometimes (often?) philosophical knowledge doesn't change those who possess or obtain it.)
20 August 2026
Paul Vander Klay is a Christian Reformed minister who has a YouTube channel connected more or less loosely with Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, John Vervaeke. I've watched his channel for a few years on and off, drawn to his video titles on subjects that interest me.
Vander Klay could be seen as being in the tradition of Reformed pastor-theologians (in his case, more "pastor-cultural-commentators"), and one of his influences is Tim Keller, another in that tradition. Vander Klay's channel is largely about relating the church to itself (Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox) and society. It's also about the interface between Christianity and non-Christianity. The channel is part of a community ("TLC") which Vander Klay founded (or co-founded? I don't remember clearly), which drew together people orbiting Peterson, often enough people on the edges of Christianity and non-Christianity, so that they had conversations with each other about religion and life. Vander Klay has a sort of in-person version of this, called Estuary, which meets in multiple cities. (The metaphor of saltwater meeting freshwater.) Vander Klay makes a point of interviewing "randos" (ordinary people without Internet standing, I guess), talking about their life stories. Some of his videos are of him rehearsing sermons for his day job. Otherwise, Vander Klay's videos are usually him speaking improvisationally, somewhat like Andy Edwards.
Both Vander Klay and Edwards are older and come from professions with an educational and pastoral element (Edwards being a music teacher). They both have a base of knowledge that they can draw on on the fly. Both of them could be seen as cultural critics ("critic" in the sense of "literary criticism", someone who speaks about culture, considers it from different angles, traces influences, etc.). Vander Klay has ADHD and he is curious, sociable, and disorganized to some extent. Vander Klay has worked as a missionary, and comes from a ministry family. Vander Klay has opinions, but presents them with a light touch, sometimes speaking in a way which seemingly avoids presenting his opinion, avoiding conflict.
I find myself drifting into scenes/followings that are conservative in some sense, but aesthetically inclined. When I was young, Francis Schaeffer (another Reformed pastor-theologian) fit the bill. Much more recently, the "Christian humanists" (or whatever the name of that scene is, kind of like a more Catholic version of the aesthetic conservative idea). I'm not so much a fan of Jordan Peterson, but he fits that (conservative, but wears custom suits that are trying to express an aesthetic), and Vander Klay orbits Peterson somewhat. There is a kind of political conservatism (maybe more British than American) that I think connects -- don't change old things if you don't have to. While I try not to have mainstream political opinions, the idea of working with rather than against nature, working with existing institutions rather than razing them to the ground, does appeal to me. (Nature and tradition have a certain aesthetic quality to them.)
I'm not sure what to think of this. Is that the box I should put myself in? I might be OK saying something like "my loyalty is not to conservatism or progressivism, but my search for truth may lead me to agree with conservatives sometimes". These "aesthetic conservatives" have the virtue of typically being more humane than some other right-wing movements. Truth-seeking should probably lead to a somewhat moderate view (because listening to many different voices to draw them into one truth should moderate you somewhat, or a lot), and I think these aesthetic conservatives tend to reach into both Christian and secular culture, maybe being aesthetically liberal or secular, while religiously conservative.
Aesthetic conservatism may seem like a comfortable setting. I could see the label applying to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. I grew up in a basically aesthetic conservative movement, Tolkien and Lewis Christianity (along with other influences). It's hard to see anything wrong with it in itself (maybe because of my temperament and formation). However, considering movements and thoughts from outside that mindset, I think that seeking the truth means that you must sometimes leave behind the past, and even beauty. Trying to be true to the truth is what leads to doing things in the real world. Trying to be true to the truth produces seriousness. I think secular effective altruism (despite its failings), models this better than the aesthetic conservatisms that I've known.
I see Vander Klay as a window into a certain kind of world I'm interested in: Christianity (particularly theologically-conservative Christianity), non-Christian religions and spirituality (as he understands them from a Christian background), politics, society. In that he fills the role of a journalist. I also see Vander Klay as an example of what people can do to make the Internet (and IRL community) better. Imitating him in different social scenes (the Estuary movement has a training manual you might be able to reference; or you could watch his channel to pick up on how he does things online) could help take diffuse interest groups (e.g. various corners of the Internet, like LitStack and PhilStack (literary Substack and philosophical Substack)) and make them more self-conscious and self-aware, "keep score", and also promote genuine friendship amid intellectual scenes that can often by default be about discourse rather than substantive human connection. His emphasis on conversation is an interesting counterpoint to typical Internet culture, and becoming pastoral, as he is, may be helpful to those who are intellectual.
I think that a loose parallel can be drawn between Peterson and Vander Klay on the one hand, and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander on another. Peterson and Yudkowsky being similarly dark, weird, and dramatic, the founders, while Vander Klay and Alexander are the more reasonable community builders and popularizers. Both Vander Klay and Alexander have that "journalist of a subculture and of society at large" element to what they do.
18 September 2026
(fixed HTML 21 September 2026 and 3 October 2026)
Originally posted 1 July 2026 on Substack.
Sometimes I think about starting a "politics and culture" magazine called The Desert Star. I don't have the resources or audience to start it now, but here is a manifesto for it. July Fourth is when Americans commemorate the signing of a manifesto of sorts, so maybe this is in season.
--
"The Desert Star" refers to stars: faint points of light in the sky that clouds, day, and city lights can obscure, which are independent of what happens on earth and can be guides to navigation. It refers to the desert, living in an undefined, unrewarding, and hostile environment.
This manifesto comes out of my religious and philosophical views as they interface with the public sphere. I have tried to write correct things that change people's worldviews. As a manifesto, this is more political, more temporal, more mainstream and secular, and manifestos could somehow be taken as metaphors and aesthetics, are more rhetorical. Manifestos are expressions of political art and artistic politics. They are about resonating people as they already kind of agree with you, rather than demonstrating the truth for those who don't already believe it. This resonating is characteristic of art and politics.
The danger with political-rhetorical speech is that it "fires up the base", producing polarization, rather than adjusting one's worldview to fit reality. This manifesto is a "self-aware" manifesto, that tries to account for the danger of political-rhetorical speech as a genre.
This manifesto may not be complete, but is something to start with.
--1. The root of reality is free will. Everything is somebody's decision. Things could be otherwise. The future is not yet fully decided -- good things can become bad and bad things can become good. Opposites of free will include gravity and drift.
--2. Religion requires free will.
--3. Excellence is required for salvation, is far off and yet attainable.
--4. Humans make themselves gods over others through charisma, patronage, and psychological violence, and are made gods by those who seek a savior or devil. But a human made into a god is not worth fearing.
--5. Truth exists independent of the human mind and human culture. It's possible for people to be wrong. Moral truth exists -- there are good and bad ways to bear witness to it. We don't automatically know what the moral truth is, and if someone disagrees with us, we have some reason to think we might be wrong.
--6. The good has been shattered and its shards (precious values) are scattered in many different cultures.
--7. Winning creates a loser, who then wants revenge. Those in exile do not win, and must survive. Patience is to refrain from lunging after victory and salvation.
--8. Non-ideal things have their function -- perhaps to make up for the failures of more-ideal things.
--9. Everything interrelates.
--1. Free-willed religion involves presenting choices to people, who can freely choose the right ones. This presentation presupposes freedom of speech and religion. There is a legal form of freedom of speech and religion (e.g. the United States' First Amendment and its enforcement) but also an unofficial, effective form (whether people feel they can and actually do exercise their legal freedoms of speech and religion, and whether they can and do exercise them despite lack of those legal freedoms).
--2. The truth is spoken by those who have effective freedom of speech.
--3. Competitive culture leads us to throw away what is valuable for what is competitive. Adversarial culture leads to enmity. Both of these can inhibit truth and free will, as does coercion. Adversarial, competitive, and coercive solutions to problems may, unfortunately, turn out to be necessary. But it is bad technique to use them, if non-adversarial, non-competitive, non-coercive ones may be found.
--4. "The answer" to political problems is "missions and/or cultural exchange": vulnerable, interpersonal, intentional, cross-cultural-oriented contact between members of divergent cultures over a long time period. War and capitalism are (seemingly or really) necessitated by international competition, driven by international mistrust. Polarization is driven by mistrust as well. Mistrust driven by lack of serious, basically positive contact with others.
--5. "The answer" to political problems is truth-seeking.
--6. Identity is not found in the body, psychological nature, group belonging, or history, but rather in the exercise of free will. (Regardless of how people perceive you, your background is only your identity if you choose to identify with it.) Identity can be minimized for altruistic purposes.
--7. Politics can be about humans threatening humans, becoming obsessed with humans, making humans into gods. Politics is inherently secular and humanistic. Whereas true religion frees people from humanism.
--8. We will die or become sustainable. Some sustainable societies might be horrifying, some conducive to truth.
30 September 2026
One time in a conversation, I noted my connection with effective altruism, and my interlocutors, young, probably at least somewhat intellectual people, had a negative reaction.
Now, I read about recent "EA is a sex cult" language. Maybe EA is seen in a negative light for other reasons, as well. So I thought I would explain how it could be that I would have a basically positive view of EA, and what EA means to me. I will also discuss the rationalist community a little bit, though I have less connection to them.
One thing that EA does right is "show up to the conversations that matter". Many much more normal people don't do that. Futurism is an important conversation, and EA does show up to that conversation. I disagree with some EAs about futurism (perhaps the ones who stand out the most for having pungent beliefs). I try to "show up to the conversation" about the future in my own contradicting way. But I have to give them credit for caring about it, and (from my perspective) pioneering the categories in which I can have my response.
Their idea of "expanding the moral circle", and of personal responsibility for the overall state of the world (the Drowning Child Illustration) are also valuable. Some of their communication and epistemic norms are valuable.
You can read horror stories about EAs, and horror stories about evangelicals. I'm not sure I could belong to either group. I tried to be part of EA to some extent online (as an outsider, to be fair) and it just didn't happen. I grew up in what could be called a "moderate evangelical" setting (one which wasn't very strongly into evangelism). The more intensely evangelism-oriented evangelicals (what I automatically think of when I hear the word "evangelical") I think would be too much for me. My religion separates me both from them and EA. However, I have a basically positive view of both EA and evangelicalism. I think of them as being soldiers, sacrificing themselves, doing wrong, being misguided, but caring about what matters most.
When I was in college, I was part of a campus fellowship, as well as attending a church. The church I went to was not affiliated with the fellowship. The fellowship wanted to draw people in to deeper, more intense affiliation with it. They didn't push it, but their structure was designed to do that. I didn't go in deeper because I didn't want to attend the church affiliated with the fellowship, nor go on the retreats that would conflict with attendance at my church. I found out after I graduated that the fellowship was spiritually and/or emotionally abusive. But I never saw that, because I never went in to "the inner circle" of it.
My experience with EA has been similar. I see them as having three expressions: ideology, public (generally online) spaces, private and/or offline interactions. I only have significant experience with the first two. The first, the ideology, I have written about before and I think is a valuable thing to consider, and sometimes to adopt. I have my issues with the second, public EA, but it's nothing scandalous, just a sense that I was not being paid attention to for whatever reason, maybe because my writing style was not like theirs, I was too religious, too philosophical. Upvote based platforms like the EA Forum are such that no one decides "I will reject this piece" (unless they downvote, which I don't remember happening to me), they just fail to pay attention to it, and then it is not recommended for other people to read, the way upvoted material is. The community as a whole rejects ideas without any one person taking responsibility for a move of rejection. A movement that was optimizing for considering unusual views might not use an upvote-based platform, so that the unusual things could really get platformed. But I think EA had an important mission to pursue, and didn't have time to consider things outside its interests, even though being open-minded is supposed to be part of its mission. So they went with an upvote-based platform.
(What would the opposite of an upvote-based platform be? Maybe being stuck in a small group, like a local meetup group, or some replication of that online. Over time, you have to deal with the people who are unlike you, and you might slowly be influenced by them.)
Like the fellowship I was in in college, I never saw the weirder, darker things in EA, which seem to happen in person and not online, and with those who are more deeply enmeshed in the social scene. If I recommend EA, I'm mostly recommending the ideology, or at least some of it, and to some extent being on the Forum, because that's basically all I have experienced.
I mentioned the rationalists above. I tried both the Sequences and LessWrong but never could connect with them. Not for me. However, I did read Slate Star Codex from sometime in 2016 until 2020 when it ended, as well as a number of older posts, and I did keep up with Astral Codex Ten until recently (SSC and ACX being Scott Alexander's two blogs). I got at least a bit of rationalist influence through that. I attended a Slate Star Codex meetup group for a few years before the pandemic. (There was an EA there, but most discussion was either SSC-related or general intellectual discussion.)
(I have also had a bit of interaction with post-rationalists/TPOT, but didn't go into it much, didn't find it to be for me.)
I was significantly affected by hearing about the Drowning Child Illustration at a talk given in 2013. I have spent about a decade somewhere in the fandom of Scott Alexander, a time in which I developed my own writing. I feel myself moving away from that world. Maybe it was more a school than anything else. I don't have any rationalist or EA friends (though at least some affiliation with Christians who read Scott Alexander).
Optimistically, EAs will become MSLians. The cultures are similar. (And similarly with evangelicals.) However, I can see that both EAs and evangelicals are on important missions, and could easily view what I have to say with suspicion, as some kind of scam to veer them off their missions. Secular EAs may have a bias against religion, which they might argue is justified from how bad apologetics have always been. They would rather prevent billions of future beings from suffering, or something they can be more sure of like that. Christian EAs might not approach religion in as evangelical (in the sense of salvation-maximizing) a way as I would (otherwise they wouldn't be getting so involved with secular well-being within the EA movement, would join an evangelical organization instead), although I could see some of them maybe liking MSL/VMH. If I see myself as a missionary, it may be as much that I transmit some EA influence to non-EAs, as that I bring theistic belief to EAs.
03 October 2026
This was originally written to be posted on Substack.
Here on Substack recently, one thread is "eternal conscious torment vs. universalism". I think of eternal conscious torment (ECT) as a clear expression of what I call "the old theocentrism", while universalism is an expression of what I call "humanism". The old theocentrism consists of a perfect God without needs, who is angry with us when we sin perhaps because we violate his honor, or who behaves toward us with an alien and perfect justice. God does not exist for us, we exist for God. God is not familiar to us, God is Other. God is the I AM -- thus, we think, he is self-existent, self-asserting, a perfect living standard from outside us. This God, with his alien wrath and alien psychology finds it reasonable for some of us (or most of us?) to burn in agony for all eternity ("eternal conscious torment"), or perhaps to stumble in a mediocre darkness ("eternal conscious suffering"?).
(I'm aware that "theocentric" can have specific, other meanings, but here I use it just as "God is the center".)
Humanism reverses that. Yes, God is the I AM, the self-existing source, but not of judgment, alien justice, wrath, and untouchability, but rather of love (like that described in 1 Corinthians 13), generosity, warmth, care (distant though he can seem to be), the fruit of the Spirit, perhaps occasionally some anger, but a being completely understandable from a human perspective (not that we understand the details of God, but that emotionally we find him understandable, find him acceptable from a human perspective). God is not the Other -- maybe he is a little bit, but mostly he's familiar to us. God does not exist for himself. God is selfless. God exists for us, always puts us first. God lives for us, serves us, provides for us, and blesses us. This God could hardly ever condemn a single one of us to hell. Certainly not one of ECT. And, because the God of humanism is just as powerful as the God of the old theocentrism, God will get exactly what he wants, all of us in heaven in the end. The logical conclusion of humanism is universalism.
These are cultures. A certain kind of person gravitates toward the old theocentrism, while another kind of person gravitates toward humanism. Perhaps some are drawn to both. People act sort of like the God they admire. Certainly there are churches (particularly conservative ones) that uphold the old theocentrism, others (more liberal ones) that go all-in on humanism, and others (certain evangelicals, perhaps) who mix the two. Sometimes churches of one sort deliberately avoid being of the other.
Churches try to be biblical (even liberal ones quote the Bible). Does the Bible say which one is best? The Bible is ambiguous, maybe not completely ambiguous (maybe one side, or a particular mixture of the two, really does have more weight to it than the others -- I haven't looked at this in depth in a long time), but still ambiguous enough that people can find each of the two, and their mixture, somewhere in it. Perhaps a certain amount of theology (additional reasoning not found explicitly in the Bible) is needed to explain how the Bible fits a particular view.
What if someone disliked both the old theocentrism and humanism? What options would they have? One would be to leave Christianity. Another would be to live in cognitive dissonance, remaining in cultures downstream of these two principles or their mixture and in some sense not being at home in them. However, what if there was a new way of seeing Christianity? (Or of seeing theism, since one could see some "old theocentrism" in Judaism and Islam, and potentially in novel theisms yet to be devised, and similarly with "humanism".) What I have to offer is a "new theocentrism".
In this new theocentrism, God is very powerful, knows very much or even all there is to know, and yet is profoundly limited. Like with humanism, he cares for all of us, but he is powerless to make our free will be other than we make it to be. He can influence us, but we are ultimately sovereign in our tiny kingdoms, where we rule over our hearts. We are little gods ruling over him. Because he loves us, and we often don't love him, we, not he, have the power in our relationship with him. He can't help be committed to us, but we have the power to reject him, and we often do. Our hearts are not in line with his, and though we were originally his children, we are strangers to his heart. He feels our rejection, and watches us condemn ourselves through the misapplication of our free will, is frustrated, not exactly despairing, but not living a happy, beatific life.
God knows everything that can be known (although perhaps not the future that has not been made yet through our free decisions), so he knows exactly what it's like to experience what we do, he experiences all experiences firsthand. Therefore, God feels all unbearable pain that any being feels. He's stuck in reality, as a God of truth. Because God is limited, he can't endure us forever if our existence torments him. What is unbearable to him must cease to exist. We can come into tune with him fully (cease to cause him unbearable pain; notably, cease to be the kind of people who sin) -- or not, and if not, we must cease to exist. If that happens, God loses us, a father who has lost his child forever. (Annihilationism, a middle road between ECT and universalism which I suppose can lean old theocentric or humanistic, naturally fits the new theocentrism.)
What makes "the new theocentrism" theocentric is that when we understand God's situation, out of compassion, pity, and an awakened maturity, we come to put God first, the same way the humanists think God puts us first, seeing our wretchedness. The old theocentrists perhaps see our wretchedness and see something to be disciplined, something worthy of destruction. The humanists see our wretchedness as calling forth the most intense and selfless love from God. But the new theocentrists, I suppose, see that both God and humans are wretched, and to the extent that we are gods, if we understand God's wretchedness, we too will use our "divine powers" to care for God, not exactly to save him, but to put him and his well-being first.
Could this view be biblical? It's there in the cloud of Scripture (the ambiguity of Scripture). God seems to struggle to relate to Israel. They are "stiff-necked". Somehow they had the power to not be reformed by the might of God. God alternates between tenderness and wrath. (Some see him fitting the type of the abusive husband in this, but I see a frustration with people who refuse to love him, whose hearts are hard toward him, and I think my interpretation is closer to what the Bible wants to say.) God being less than the God of perfection (without saying he's not morally perfect) can be seen in his (apparent?) regret of creation leading him to flood the earth, and his (apparent?) regret of making Saul king. If God regrets, God can make mistakes. Verses that support humanism may turn into verses supporting the new theocentrism if we see God as suffering and limited in his ability to save us. There are verses that make God seem like the old theocentrism instead, I assume, or else old theocentrists would quit being old theocentrists. Perhaps a frustrated God (who really is the moral standard) lashes out at his people in wrath. But it's because they have a power over him that he can't escape. And a God who is limited presents himself as almighty because that's what we took seriously back in the day, and often still do. (Similarly God answers the prayers of many of us in the guise of the God of humanism.) He presented the most accurate version of himself that we would trust, and gave us hints of his true situation if we cared to follow them.
Soteriology: An old question in Christianity is "the sovereignty of God vs. the free will of man". I feel like there are three options here: assume God is sovereign, and follow that out logically to its conclusion (the Calvinists may do this best, and certainly predestination is part of this); hold "God is sovereign" and "humans have free will with respect to their salvation" "in tension", or simply don't apply reason consistently in that area; or assume humans have free will and follow that out logically to its conclusion, and the new theocentrism is an example of that. If humans have free will, they have sovereignty over God (they have a kind of inviolable right to be themselves), and that helps explain why the world does not look the way God would want it to. (I'm not aware of any theologies that exist that are other examples of taking human free will to its logical conclusion, but I guess there could be liberal theologies that do from a humanist perspective.)
Politics: "Old theocentrism" and "humanism" may not map 100% onto "Republican" and "Democrat", respectively, but there is some correlation. "New theocentrism" might imply a new political movement, or a realignment of the two parties. The new theocentrism might be a new political centrism, as it could be seen as a "synthesis" of the "thesis" of old theocentrism and the "antithesis" of humanism. It would have a different tonality than secular liberal centrism. The motor of progressivism is care, and so the most progressive position may end up being some form of the new theocentrism.
(Maybe there is a less US-centric set of examples that someone who knew more than me could draw on, but probably there is something like this possible in other countries.)
Development of culture: At this moment in history, I see three directions: 1) business as usual, more or less directionless, drifting; 2) have a vision (of expansion, perhaps endless); 3) have another vision (of settling in to sustainability). Do we think that there's an infinite supply of "love" (money, political power, cultural standing) to which we are entitled? Then we'll act like it. I feel like deep down the Republicans and Democrats both feel like they can get what they want out of life and be happy, if only those obstacles in the other party would get out of the way -- and thus they fight each other, sometimes bitterly. But in a finite world, even at best we don't get what we want. Not even God gets what he wants, and that's actually a bad thing. The old theocentrism and humanism posit a God (a parental figure), who can supply everything we need and want, can take care of us and discipline us. Perhaps one is like an old-school father, the other like a contemporary mother (or somewhat feminized father?), and the two together form a set of parents, who create the space in which we can be children. The new theocentrism says that we need to be adults, we are adult children of God. Adults come to recognize limitations. And so the endless expansion vision is not so far from humanism, from universalism -- but what if that vision is not reality? How can we escape from that fantasy? Must we go back to the old theocentrism? Maybe better to go to the new theocentrism, which may be the theology that best supports having a vision of sustainability.
Economics: Old theocentrism has a kind of connection with obedience (to the point of self-punishment) and austerity. The Desert Fathers had an old theocentric streak. Perhaps the Soviets were in league with old theocentrism with their command economy, their world of obedience and austerity, despite doing so for ostensibly humanistic reasons. A new theocentric approach to the economy might emphasize the adulthood of consumers and producers. Adulthood, perhaps, is freedom in a limited world. In that case, a new theocentric economy would be free market (not centrally planned), and yet instead of promoting endless growth (the direction of profit into the accumulation of capital and then to innovation), it would have to have a mechanism whereby economies freely limit their own growth. (Adolescence, perhaps, is freedom in an unlimited world.)
We must have capitalism because it enables us to compete with our enemies. Our enemies, perhaps, are horrified by our adolescence in the West. If we want them to stop being so illiberal, do they have to become like us? Or perhaps there is a worldview which both of us can adopt, which is neither of us -- something like the new theocentrism. (I don't see Islam easily adopting all of the new theocentric view given in this post, but maybe something of the same tonality would help.)
Avoiding dystopia: 1984 (old theocentrism or a modernized fellow traveler) vs. Brave New World (a hedonism born out of consumerism, a semi-inevitable perversion of humanism). Which dystopia will we risk more, to avoid the other more surely? Maybe it's possible that the new theocentrism avoids both, perhaps there is no dystopia native to it and so it can be pursued fully. Perhaps it is vulnerable to some kind of dystopia, but not those.
History: The new theocentrism could be seen as part of the Enlightenment, in the sense that the Enlightenment sought to make Western people adults, to "dare to know". To my eyes, the Renaissance and Enlightenment were adolescent, the adolescent beginnings of adulthood. But the new theocentrism to me seems like the end, or the beginning of the end, of that adolescence.
Perhaps it is appropriate that at this point in history, we are so unstable, insane, by sheer luck so far escaping self-annihilation, are of many minds, our own development leading toward our destruction -- very much like the life of those in adolescence (up to age 19?) or extended adolescence (up to age 35?). Perhaps the dynamism of our society is like the dynamism of extended adolescence, and relative peace, and relative stasis, awaits us if we survive.
What about the future of Christianity?: If you're a universalist, do you need to spread the gospel? Everyone will end up in heaven in the end. Sure, it's nice if people live nicer lives on earth, and Christianity can help with that. But people can live fairly nice lives on earth without Christianity. So Christianity in this life goes from being something necessary to being something nice. It makes sense that such a Christianity would be in decline. The nicest, most humanistic churches, the mainline Protestants, are declining more quickly than those that partake more in the old theocentrism. It's like theocentrism is a fountain that provides urgency, the necessity of God. Living a nice life is not enough -- it needs to offer something secular humanism can't offer. The old theocentric churches are based in asserting an alien God and an alien theology, against natural reason, and thus they tend to be unhealthy and not make sense. People awaken to this, start to see with natural eyes, and leave, often with a sense of trauma and divorce. Then they may end up in a humanistic church. Others leave Christianity entirely. Christianity might benefit if it found a replacement for this story, process, ecosystem. It would need to ground itself in natural reason rather than asserted belief, and yet not end up with the Christianized secular humanism of liberal, humanistic Christianity. And it would need to offer a theocentrism which was not the old theocentrism.
"Humanism" is an ethical orientation toward humans, their well-being and significance. This is often what we mean by "humanism". We could say that "theism" is an ethical orientation toward God, his well-being and significance. "Theism" already means "believing that God exists, or a particular God exists". So I would say "ethical theism", to distinguish from the "epistemic theism" which is what we usually mean when we say "theism".
I've been working on a writing project since 2013, one that I feel like is "finished" (if anything is), but which I must promote. As a writer, I've tried to develop a natural theology (called "MSL"), a soteriology/eschatology (called "voluntary millennial holiness"), and ethical theism, all of which work together (for instance, according to voluntary millennial holiness, there is a long, finite time after this life for us to complete the process of coming into tune with God). I feel like ethical theism is the topic I've developed least of the three. Right now, I feel somewhat limited as a writer (tired). Someday I may try to write a book where I write a commentary on the Bible from an ethically-theistic perspective, to spell out how God might have felt and thought at various points in the Bible. (Or someone else could write that book.)
Also relevant to this post, I have written about the process of civilization sorting out what it should believe, the problem of evil (which is always easier to deal with if you believe that God is limited in some way), and even provide an attempt (I am not an economist) at a mechanism for a free-market, but not capital-accumulating, or less-capital-accumulating, economy. These can be found at my old blog Formulalessness.
It occurs to me that Eastern Orthodoxy (and maybe some of the more obscure Christian groups, like the Anabaptists), which I don't know as well as I might, may not fit neatly into my version of "old theocentrism vs. humanism". It may not simply be a mixture of "old theocentrism" and "humanism". Perhaps if you don't like "old theocentrism" and "humanism", you might become Orthodox -- maybe that's exactly part of its appeal. I don't know enough to do a good comparison between Orthodox theology ("Eastern theocentrism"?) and "new theocentrism". I did mention Islam and Judaism briefly, which I also don't know enough to say much about.