12.03.11

Virtual church of the holy brick (I take a stab at founding a new world religion)

Posted in General at 2:23 pm by nemo

Virtual church of the holy brick (I take a stab at founding a new world religion)
The Dalai Lama’s discourse, ‘Beyond Religion’, sets me to acknowledge we are going ‘beyond (older) religions’ but that we still can pursue the reality of religion in some future mode.

My idea to found a new world religion is more than a slap in the face for the new atheists. I know what you are thinking: he’s too ugly to found a religion, ugh…But I have a work around for that and, anyway, a Zorro mask, or the man in the Iron Mask are alternate possibilities.
In any case, the virtual church of the holy brick is a situation of getting ready to become realized: founding a religion would be a big thing, we can focus on the countdown to the laying of the foundation stone, the brick, to launch at t=0 the real church by adding water to the mortar, taking up the trowel, to lay the brick in place. By many accounts that’s the point the Devil enters the New Church. But perhaps the opposite is worse. So a virtual church has possibilities. Like some sufi circles that simply wait on the Awakened One a virtual church can be a set of chairs in a room, like a Quaker meeting with a near zero bullshit factor, a great innovation, btw, and one of the last phases of the Reformation.
Moral: we need something adapted to secularism, and that is very simple: study and many of the motions of a church, still before the AWESOME t=zero launch point, as free masons (charles chaplin stand ins) redux laying down the holy brick (or something like that).
I am a persistent critic of the figure Gurdjieff, but he did say one good thing: you can’t do anything, so just study yourself, as preparation to observing yourself, or doing anything, ditto for religion. To create a religion is not a trivial thing, understanding it is not a trivial thing, and bollocksing it up is nearly inevitable, thence getting thru the escape hatch is not a trivial thing. What to do? Self-study, in Quaker circles could be good. Study of the history of religion could be good, and a good virtual step toward real religion. Like Sheherezade, the t=zero moment can be delayed by a fresh tale everyday, or a period of silence in those Quaker circles.
There is too much to understand to simply erase religion in the name of secularism. Secularism was created by religious protestants. Should I fear it will be undone by atheists?
But the new atheism could prosper well in a Quaker circle in the virtual church staring at the holy brick in recessed glass. The project of self-study proposed by Gurdjieff is a good one, and acknowledges that our evolutionary software is so complex we don’t understand it and end up in spastic confusions. That virtual church is the right org for this schlemiel (spelling??? ugh) awaiting the great book, The Doctrine of the Schlemiels, the protocal of repentance for, well, shlemielhood, repentance meaning ‘re-penting’, or changing one’s mind, metanoia …

My point is that secularism is not going to succeed against religion in the crude cult of atheist humanism or the project to end all religions. That’s not a plea for theism. Those quaker circles almost made to a true atheism, btw. Almost. Religions, in the Axial Age legacy, are going to end themselves, and the substitutes won’t be nice. The new atheists have to have something better planned than destroying ethical beliefs in adolescents to create Ayn Rand groupies, Darwinian cutthroats, and Nietzschean nihilists. So the need to #Occupy religion is critical, but the post-Hegelian world of the current left, in the mode of Feuerbach, is a poor outcome to the Reformation.
The job of the left, nonetheless, as the generation of Feuerbach/Marx made clear is to create an avenue in the post-Reformation, to complete, as Hegel insisted, the Reformation, stuck like the childhood of Kant in the transformations of Pietism, a none too trivial transform of the mighty Reformation, and a discipline squared that wigged out even the disciplinarian Kant. Those quaker circles are surely one outcome foreseen by Hegel. Quakers, btw, were the witnesses to the birth of abolitionism, and honorary gargoyles for the left. You can attack religion, but you can’t escape the hope for a discipline of self-consciousness, and the hope that man can realize the Doctrine of the Schlemiels in true repentance, which is the action of his self-consciousness as the Swtich Turned on for his evolutionary software. The question of ethics becomes an aspect of that ‘repentance’, in the meta-kantian project of reason which is more than logical consistency, pace the pietism of Kant, but, more, the realization of the Will in nature, and the Will in man, etc….. Schopenhauer stumbled on the problem here: man can’t easily realize his Will, and the disconnect with neuroscience is going to sink the false secularism of the cult of scientism.

The virtual church of the Holy Brick is, therefore, a worthy project and doctrine for ‘secular’ diehards/fantatics/schlemmiels and hoping adding some substance to the hope against hope of beating the devil at the ominous t=0 moment.
Maybe stay virtual, like Sheherezade, and reset the countdown at each subsequent asembly of the quaker circle.

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