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Religious systems and algorithmic structures function as sets of guidelines or instructions that influence behavior and determine outcomes. Religions provide moral and ethical frameworks through their teachings and practices, similar to how algorithms define a sequence of steps to achieve a specific goal. Much like algorithms govern processes, religions dictate community behavior, serving as a cohesive force that shapes culture. This perspective underscores the significant influence of religious systems on social dynamics and their pivotal role in molding the nature and quality of civilizations.
Recognizing religion as an algorithmic construct provides a framework for understanding its impact on communal behavior, cultural norms, and the overarching character of societies.
Society behaves according to what its individuals believe, and religion is what we use to teach a belief to the society we live in. In general people are both proud and ignorant, do not question reality, nor discern the truth from experience, still they will fight for what they believe, regardless if it is correct or not. A population can be easily manipulated, a trick that is well known by those in power, and has been the purpose of religion ever since the word religion was first uttered.
We are more affected by what others believe than by our own independent search for understanding.
Since religion shapes the people who surround us, and in turn they shape us, we must make certain that religion be truthful as well as beneficial. Encouraging students and congregations to question established dogmas could then transform religion into a truth-seeking process, dedicated to cultivating a more functional and enlightened community.
If a society malfunctions, if we see injustice, it is because the algorithm, or the religion and beliefs of society are faulty. If we want a good life, to live within a society that is not dysfunctional, we must modify the religion of the land until it provides the desired effect.
In scrutinizing the Western Judaeo/Christian-Islamic religious model, one observes a potent algorithm that has, for nearly two millennia, subjugated a peasant class. Based on superstition, this model fosters notions of racial superiority, subjugates women, and discriminates against the uninitiated. Rooted in the Jewish Old Testament, which recounts a history of conflict and promotes the idea of a "chosen people" destined for global servitude, this framework has historically fueled prejudice, subjugation, war, and colonialism.
For Christians, the Old and New Testament are seen as one. Yet, there are many contradictions between the two texts. One of these rather important contradictions is in Corinthians where it says that The Old Testament, creator God, has blinded people from the truth of the true God. The Old Testament God is therefor seen as malicious, and akin to the Platonic Demiurge, Great Architect, or Satan figure, thereby designating the "chosen people," as chosen by a false god or Satan.
In whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. 2 Corinthians-4-4
Although this is a common understanding within Gnostic Gospels, this conclusion is rarely voiced in Church because of the obvious contradiction with the Old Testament, and the one God principal of both Religions.
This narrative forces a dialectic between good and evil, as well as designating Christians as a servant class, the meek, adhering to the notions of turning the other cheek and love of enemy. Simultaneously, the wielders of this narrative, the priests and rulers, would be reasonably implicated as Satan worshipers enslaving a servant class, and promoting a violent chosen class through the inclusion of the Old Testament text.
A narrative that goes unnoticed unless you critically read and study both texts, which will alert you to the malicious and absurd nature of this faith.
Religions provide moral and ethical frameworks, this has been our algorithm or set of instructions and has been responsible for the nature or behavior of the history of Western civilization, it has both ruled us, and failed us for many years.
Of course, if you believe that a master-slave society is good, this religion has been ideal.
While philosophy and science have moved ahead, religion is dogmatic and changes slowly, this has left us with a belief that is better suited for the middle ages, and is no longer appropriate for our current society.
In the 19th century we began to recognize that our belief had become inadequate, as was notably pointed out by Friedrich Nietzsche.
"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? — .
Nietzsche speaks to the fact that the "Age of Enlightenment'' began an erosion of our belief, and that society's view of the existence of God had become unreasonable. The old dogma had been proven false, and now found itself unable to stand against modern thought.
Nietzsche does not indicate that religion is no longer needed, quite the contrary, religion is what gives society stability. He suggests a new dogma based on our “will to power,” for power is what will fulfill the “will.'' This is a dogma for those superior individuals, who are above the law, for those who rule, and what he calls “Supermen.” To Nietzsche, Christianity is a dogma for the meek, and a belief designed for enslavement, an ideology which is destructive to his “Superman.” Nietzsche sees Christianity and its moral laws, as what is given to that part of our society which serves the Superclass of men who rule. He has simply re-stated the justice of the strong, Machiavellian political theory, a concept of justice for those who know the path forward, and make it their will at any cost, certainly not how the "Equal Justice" of a Democracy should work.
“I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s suggestion is quite functional, and works well as long as the lower class does not get wise, and revolt. This only gives us the old law without God, and the glorification of the master slave paradigm. It does have an enormous, obvious, and yet a mostly unmentioned flaw.
What is the purpose of any human “will to power”?
What is the point of having a “Will” if it is only to have power over others? For that matter, what is the ultimate point of any activity which the “will” pushes us to do, and are we not by the motive of this "will" actually deterministic automatons? Since no one has ever given us a fundamental reason for our actions, or purpose for existence itself, it is simply absurdity to go off doing anything without knowing "why" in the first place.
Without a defined purpose for existence how can the “will” be defined? For that matter, how can God be defined without a concrete basis for existence.
When Maxwell discovered electromagnetism, someone asked what the purpose of his discovery was, he answered, “what is the purpose of a new born baby.” No known religion or philosophy provides a realistic answer to the purpose of existence. If a “Superman” is expected to act, it would be prudent to first know why, and what verifiable purpose this "Superman" may have to exist at all.
I will here propose a Religion that provides a proper explanation for our existence, one which is not absurd. Then from this explanation we could devise a basis for a set of instructions that would permit an agreeable and harmonious life. We need both rules of conduct, and a premise for existence, along with an honest position or perspective of the unknown, or metaphysical. A truthful basis for theology and its rules would then need to stand up to critical scrutiny, not as we have now, a dogma accepted only by faith.
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I've lived for 70 years, and the only consistent meaning I've found in life is evolution. Primarily ones personal evolution from childhood to adulthood, and if fortunate, into the wisdom that comes with old age. It also encompasses cultural evolution, from the Stone Age to our modern society.
While some may seek different sources of meaning, the concept of evolution provides a broad framework for understanding our place in reality. I view life as an evolutionary journey that demands constant learning and growth. However, this perspective may not satisfy everyone, as most prefer to find meaning through faith, an afterlife, and the Bible.
The Bible offers meaning but can also mislead. Faith is necessary because we know so little and often rely on belief rather than facts. As for the afterlife, I see it as an excuse for avoiding the hard work of truly examining life and living as we’re meant to.
When religion fails us, we end up dissatisfied with life and longing for a heavenly solution. However, if religion gave us the right guidance, we would find fulfillment in what we’ve already been given by God. The fault isn’t with God, but with us.
Nonetheless, even without having a meaning for life, each individual identifies with his community. If religious, he is given and accepts some sort of faith based explanation for creation, powers of good and evil, along with laws or rules of conduct to live by. The individual, completely unaware, will then participate in deterministic behavior based on a belief which is derived from the social norm of the community, and period they belong to.
"The morality of the individual, then, consists in his fulfilling the duties of his social position". General Introduction to the Philosophy of History , G.W.F. Hegel
The process of humanity, the inevitable future evolution of civilization is mostly unaffected by individual belief since each individual is directed not by himself, but by the causal effects of the social construct it lives within. Each of us is a unit tied to a social order, we become who we are due to the period and location we live within. Our social order includes parents, family, language and nation, and we are deterministic creatures that do not deviate from our trajectory.
For example if an individual has concepts and beliefs which are outside of the social norm, society will push against this individual to either isolate them, or to eliminate the belief.
Religion is that social construct, even if it is an atheistic political ideology it is the causal environment that gives form to individual actions. In a sense we are in a box, a deterministic construct, where the outcome of behavior is predetermined by religion and community. We change or evolve only when outliers envision new norms from outside of this box. Then, we can change what we teach ourselves, what we believe will change, the community will evolve, and thereby affect the quality of life.
Social behavior cannot change without altering a community's foundational beliefs, as individuals seeking change are often pressured to conform to societal norms. Since religion underpins community beliefs, only a new religious framework can effectively drive lasting transformation.
God is how we define the unknown metaphysical, and physical terms like “infinite,” that we can not comprehend. Human evolution creates new technologies, we expand reality, the more we learn and create, the more complexity we generate, and the less we can know of the greater volume of the revealed reality. Our explanation of God may be a bit eroded by science, but the importance of a religion, for a proper belief for what is unknown and causal, has only become more important. If Re-Legion is the way we tie society into a pre-described social construct, it would be wise to reconstruct a new belief that is not dedicated to enslavement, discrimination , or untrue explanations of reality. We require a belief that is truthful, one that can say when something is unknown, and not simply make things up.
When I first came across Friedrich Nietzsche, my takeaway was not religion. It was his concept of eternal recurrence, as explained to me in a book called, The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler. This is the idea that in an infinite universe, made of finite matter, any state, entity or events will repeat eternally. A human life within such an eternal universe will recur indefinitely, a virtual proof of eternal life. I would then discover that the eternal recurrence was a flawed concept. For me this came from understanding that the universe is not eternal, instead, it both expands into a distance we can not see and draws into black holes. The universe, as we know it, will go away, thus potentially making any moment unique and unrepeatable. Of course, if there are infinite universes we will re-live our lives an infinite amount of times, and in infinite varieties, but this is immaterial to our particular reality, and would only make our reality even more unique and significant to us.
Religion can be truthful, scientific, and equitable. Let us consider the promise of eternal life. If we had the right technology maybe life could be eternal, at least for our intent and purpose, and there are ways of explaining eternal recurrence within a finite universe. Yet, the current theological promise of eternal life is malicious, as you would go mad if you were forced to live forever. On the other hand each life is mathematically equally significant in the structure of space-time, you can not remove a single beggar, nor is a genius more significant than a fly. Although difficult to comprehend a single life leaves a universal impression that is eternal, your life is in fact eternal.
Furthermore, most religions replace fact with faith, science is dismissed, and we lie to our children to enforce false beliefs. Religion has been an algorithm for power through the subjugation of a peasant class. The Latin phrase "In hoc signo vinces," is conventionally translated into English as "In this sign thou shalt conquer," this phrase is the sign of conviction given to us by the Roman Emperor Constantine, that Christianity would be the religion of conquest and domination for the West.
The realization that all current religion was in fact malicious is what shifted my interest from physics, to religion.
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I grew up Catholic, but not religious. When I was young, I enjoyed studying, and wanted to know a reason for life, and a cause for suffering. I had built a website for personal use, as a tool to help me study. The technology permitted me to copy, paste, and catalog information. My primary interest was in the study of entropy. I wanted to know why life was an ordered complexity, that came from a process we understood as chaotic. An evolutionary process that over time provided us the reality we see and live today.
At about the age of 50, I concluded that the physical universe was deterministic. That the chaotic physical nature behind the ordered structure we apprehend, only appears chaotic due to our inability to do the math of complexity. What we perceived as chaos was an inability to comprehend large infinite sets, and the breakdown of the differential equations we use to define the complexity of physical reality.
Metaphysics will always be with us because there are limits to math and logic. We observe reality in terms of the future, past, and present. In a similar manner to how we forecast the weather, we have only a probabilistic view of reality because the equations required to truly understand the future and past are too large for us to solve, they can only give us probabilities. There is a limit to our logic, to our thinking, just as we can not ask a dog to understand calculus, we can not go beyond certain limits of understanding. This is why metaphysics, and an accompanying religion to explain the unknown, will always be with us.
My conclusion was that there was a definite order to chaos which we were not designed to comprehend. Reality is not chaotic or random but an ordered evolving super-deterministic system. Chaos only appears chaotic to us because our math is incomplete, and therefore we are unable to see order when measuring the complexity that underlies reality. The physical reality we live in is deterministic, which indicates that the future is as immovable as the past.
The only possibility for “free will” had to be through what we define as God. God became real to me, not by faith, but in fact.
There can be only one substance, God, and everything else is merely a mode of God. Baruch Spinoza
The following two facts supported my belief:
First: Religion, and our belief in God, is the algorithm that shapes our society, and builds our future. Although God can be denied, it cannot be denied that people believe in God, and that our belief in God has been responsible for the shape of human cultural evolution. God is the unknown causal factors of the Alpha and Omega, the incalculable stream of creation. Reality is an evolving system which increases in complexity with the passage of time, who’s underlying causality is the unknowable God. Evolution is an increasing complexity and means the unknown is increasing in scope. Since technically the unknown will continue to become greater, it cannot be denied that there will always be a need for metaphysics to make sense of the unknowable.
The realm of what cannot be known must be given words and form, thus we will always need some form of religion and faith to give meaning to the unknowable, call it God, or first cause, or any other term we wish to call that which we do not understand, that which is the underlying cause of human behavior, civilization, and reality.
Second: In a finite deterministic universe, entropy is the motive force for human behavior and its civilization. This is the force that will obligate an evolution far beyond our limited human capacity to participate or understand. We must recognize that we are a limited subset of a much larger reality which is constantly evolving and increasing in complexity. Life is an emergent layer of the physical universe, intelligence is an emergent layer of life, and civilization is an emergent layer of intelligence.
What we call life or reality has evolved for billions of years and has increased in complexity over time. It is therefore only a matter of time before the increase in complexity will effectively make any imagined ideals real, making each of us an integral subset of a single universal reality with a range we can call Alpha to Omega. Christianity would say a subset of Christ, for we are not eternal, and God is the Alpha and Omega.
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Revelation 22:13
We have limited motivations and desires, we create surplus, and we can build any Utopian concept we may have imagined or attributed to our prophetic past, present, or future concepts of God.
Any God we can imagine will become a reality. It is without doubt that there will be a revelation, and all ideals conjured or desired will be fulfilled. Even if we may never know God, the prophecy we choose will become our reality. This future reality we build is of course dependent on our choice of prophecy, and it is this choice which is most crucial to our social reality.
Currently we are still mostly stupid hairless apes, with very poor manners. Therefore, the version of Utopia we produce may well be dystopian. This is why it is critical that we be truthful and educated enough, to care for and educate, not only our own kin, but everyone else that lives on our planet, otherwise fools will build hell, and we will live there.
We should note these wise words from the past -
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” Socrates.
A proper education is the solution to our dilemma, therefore, we must provide a proper education for every living soul. Because we live on one planet, and are social animals who suffer due to our surroundings our well being is dependent on the quality of the education our neighbor was provided.
“…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40
It is absurd to have a society as we do today with an ignorant servant class providing leisure and wealth to an upper class of pointless ignorant consumers, all in an eternal struggle for sexual dominance. Religion must go further than just words and belief; it must actually take responsibility for the physical reality we live. Much too often priests washed their hands of the responsibility for the immoral, ruthless, corrupt, and unscrupulous aspects of society. “The devil did it” is an unacceptable excuse, the fact is that “we did it,” and religion must be held responsible for our acts. Religion cannot just be a structure for belief, and ideology for the worship of God, but must also tend to the governance of the economy and community it ministers to.
Our priests and ministers must stop being complicit with the nobility which profit from war or subjugate their congregations. The accepting of blood money at the offering plate must stop and change into a process which builds an economy where the Church is a transparent financial institution operated by its parishioners, for the benefit of all. If the “chosen people” are to be our priest’s then this concept must be theirs to produce and administer, assisted by Christians and Muslims. Since Judaism has become Kabbalistic and the Kabbalah is Platonic, and Platonism is Christianity, then we could all agree to repair the world, TIKKUN OLAM.