Christianity
Secular Christianity: Religion as the Evolution and Culture of Morality
Abstract
Secular Christianity is more comprehensible to the secular hearer wishing to understand Christianity stripped of the gaudy mysticism Paul dressed it in. For the traditional Christian, it does not stop their personal belief in God, but asks them to accept that the message of Christ was not to force it on others. Christ’s message was a practical ethic for a successful, caring, unoppressive society for everyone. “God is love” has to be seen as meaningless outside of a social context, and acted upon within society. Those accepting it and acting on it were Christians. They live their lives by the teachings of Christ, whether they believe in God, or Christ himself. The kingdom is a social vision of the social outcome of the personal duty to love other people. Secular Christianity 2010 AW! Guide. Links to the principle AW! pages on it.
Secular Christianity
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 14 January 2010
Download Book length pdf paper—The Natural History of Secular Christianity
In this video from BloggingHeadsTV, primatolgist Frans de Waal, brought up as a Catholic, explains the evolutionary basis of Secular Christianity to Robert Wright
- The God Delusion and the Evolution of Morality. Did morals evolve? 43 kb
The belief that human morality requires religion is not true. It is a result of two millennia of Christian indoctrination, of children being taught from an early age to think moral rules come from the bible. Those taught it, usually just accept it thereafter, even as adults. No modern person, even among religious people, gets the bulk of their morals from the bible. They are mainly from what they experience in society, and little of what the bible says. In any case, to believe Giannetti, we cannot know what the bible says without a host of angels to interpret it for us. Maybe that is why most Christians, who take their God to have appeared on earth in the form of a man called Jesus, ignore almost eveything he said, especially the egregious things like “blessed are the poor”. Christ, God, is utterly clear that no one is saved except by giving all they have to the poor, yet Christians ignore God and do what a rogue called Paul, for all the Christian knows, Satan in disguise, tells them to do.
- Christian Morality 66 kb
Christian morality never inspired social justice, which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue[†]Justice and Virtue. Unless everyone is virtuous. Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modern conception of character and the way to improve and strengthen character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of ancient Judaea. A discussion of some aspects of Christian morality.
- Sharers and Selfish. Two kinds of humans? 43 kb
In the absence of a punishment opportunity, sharers will initially coöperate if they believe that others will also coöperate. However, they notice over time that other group members—the selfish ones—free ride. As sharers are only willing to coöperate if most others also coöperate, they cease to coöperate. Sharers also have a desire to punish free riders because they perceive free riding on their coöperation to be unfair. However, stopping their coöperation is the only way to punish other group members in the absence of a direct punishment of the free riders. The selfish subjects ultimately induce the sharers to free ride as well in the absence of a direct punishment opportunity.
- Christianity without Love is not Christian: Faith without Works is Dead 16 kb
Christ told a rich young man how to be saved. It was not by faith alone. He had to love God and his neighbors, and even so had to give his wealth to the poor. Like the rich today, he could not do it because the rich love money more than people! How many self proclaimed Christians can live among abject poverty, indiscriminate warfare, and widespread injustice without them realizing they just do not meet Christ’s criterion for discipleship. These “Christians” are frauds. They pretend to be Christians for the kudos it brings in a world practically devoid of Christian principles. S James showed that spiritual love was worthless unless translated into practical love. The passing Jewish priest and Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan might have prayed over and blessed the half dead Israelite, but it would not have been any good to the wounded man who wanted practical help. The Samaritan gave it. Secular Christianity returns to the practical love taught by Jesus and his brother but disparaged as “mere works” by most subsequent Christians, many of them in the US today. Only works—care and kindness for other people—shows when faith is real.
- The Path to Secular Christianity 41 kb
Christ is the Christian God, but He told them they had to be Christs to be saved. The myth of Christ expresses dictums for living which are social and so objective not purely subjective like faith. One was to love each other and another was to love God, and a third was that loving God was loving each other. These principles of Christ abolished the gap between God and man. Salvation depended on people living this practical holy life until Paul, the antiChrist, subverted Christ by teaching that faith in the atoning death of Christ was sufficient. Since then Christian churches have taught love while tolerating and even supporting every imaginable atrocity. Metatron has shown the error. Christ proclaimed God was real not transcendental. God is society. Recounting the path of secular or Metatronic Christianity.
- Morality and Moral Natural History 26 kb
One of the most striking features of natural morality is that the approval or censure of an act directly reflects the social value or social injury of the act. Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. In tribal society religion and morals had remained close to each other. Then religion became the interest of the sacerdotal caste of priests, when nations and empires were built. Then it perverted morality in the interests of that class, yielding extraordinary notions of mortally serious sin—rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, marrying, excreting, wearing hats, etc. Utterly pointless morals were invented to give priests more income, absolving the sheep of these perversions, or forcing them to get natural social arrangements like marriage celebrated by the priests, further enriching them.
- Secular Christianity, Christs and Nietzsche’s Übermenschen 26 kb
Nietzsche severely criticized Christianity, and formulated a theory of leadership by men he called “Übermenschen”, correctly “overmen”, but usually given as “supermen”. Secular Christianity considers Christ to have taught people how to behave to bring about an ideal world, a kingdom of God, God as Society. By aiming to be a Christ, to be like Christ, as perfect a man as it is possible to be, a Son of God, humans would ascend to a higher level. Nietzsche’s supermen were his idea of people being Christs, like the Cathar Perfects, ones who tried to imitate Christ. He also spoke of the “ascent to naturalness”. In Adelphiasophism, Nature is a metaphorical goddess, and the best society would be a more natural one, so the higher level becomes the metaphorical holy family of the Goddess, God and the Son—Nature, Society and a perfected Mankind.
- Why Socialism and Communism are Christian 95 kb
The metaphor of a camel going through the eye of a needle is common to both Matthew and Luke, it also being used in Luke 18:25. Do not be misled by your pastor—this passage is saying rich men cannot get into heaven. It follows in logic that the nature of the kingdom of God is such that to be able to enter it a rich man must cease to be rich. However, Jesus Christ goes on to say that what is impossible with men is not impossible with God, implying that the grace of God can save a rich man, for instance by enabling rich people to willingly surrender the riches which should otherwise exclude them from grace. Christians have diluted this so much for the benefit of the rich that there is no effective restriction now on rich men getting to heaven, according to modern clerics of most Christian sects, many of whom are using Christianity as a way to get rich themselves.
- God and Christ: Secular Christianity, Morals and the Kingdom Vision 51 kb
The message of Secular Christianity is more comprehensible to the secular hearer wishing to understand Christianity stripped of the gaudy mysticism Paul dressed it in. For the traditional Christian, it does not stop their personal belief in God, but asks them to accept that the message of Christ was not to force it on others. Christ’s message was a practical ethic for a successful, caring, unoppressive society for everyone. “God is love” has to be seen as meaningless outside of a social context, and acted upon within society. Those accepting it and acting on it were Christians. They live their lives by the teachings of Christ, whether they believe in God, or Christ himself. To reject his message of social morality, to fail to see it, to be misled by vain mystification, to refuse to love their fellow human beings and even to want to kill them, is not to live a life of Christ, and is not Christian. The kingdom is a social vision of what human life could be like and what the world could become. It is the social outcome of the personal duty to love other people.
- Death of God and Secular Christianity 37 kb
Science has proved the death of God. The God of the Christians is a dead God, a rancid God. Christians have been tricked, so what remains for them? Christ and his precepts live on. The Christian messiah lives, as they boast on their churches, but they have been misled by an incarnated Devil. They do not do what God incarnated as Christ told them. They must do what he said, then they will enter the kingdom of God. They will be surprised to find it is here on earth. It is a secular kingdom, and involves nothing supernatural. Scientists can be Christs!
- The Personal God: How Morality, Intentionality and Religion Evolved 43 kb
From his theory of intentionality, Robin Dunbar agrees that religious people treat gods as “having essentially human mental traits, like characters in a novel or play”. The ToM suggests believers think they know God’s brain. Nicholas Epley, et al, shows us they are right. People often reason egocentrically about others’ beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent’s beliefs like God. The God of the believers has just the same opinions as themselves.
- Secular Christianity: the Way for Christians and a Religion for Darwinians 13 kb
Professor Kitcher of Columbia university classifies Christianity into three main taxa, of which “spiritual” Christianity is the only one suited to the modern world, and seems closely similar to Secular Christianity. These Adelphiasophism and Secular Christianity pages are the place to start learning about it, for they combine the old respect for Nature with the human absolute need of lovingkindness for each other, as propounded in the practical moral teaching of the symbolic founder, Christ, of the most extensive religion in the world. Christ taught that we help ourselves by helping others in society when they are in need—the Golden Rule, or the Principle of Reciprocity. As God symbolises society, the Christian can only love God by loving other people. Any Pauline Christian ought to check out their gospels—God is the least among us. If you cannot love the least among us, then you are no Christian.
- Evolved Morality Distinguishes Pauline and Secular Christianity 51 kb
Since Paul, Christians have had almost two millennia to justify their revisions of Christ’s social teaching. Real Christians get on with being a Christ. Fake Christians boast about their faith. Faith and doing nothing is not an option. Christ told them precisely what they had to do—love one another. To love others, even strangers, foreigners, and enemies, brings salvation, not singing hymns, silent prayers and lighting candles. Christ, God incarnated as a man, Christians tell us, was unequivocal about it, yet they ignore God and pursue the do nothing faith of Paul. Love as empathy and assistance unites what were entirely separate and self reliant animals, human beings, in the society they form together in their joint purpose, co-operation to their mutal advantage. When Christians say that love unites people in God, God is a metaphor for society. If people fail to preserve human society, humanity dies, and God dies with it, for God is human society.
- The Failed Hypothesis of God 29 kb
God is an old hypothesis meant to explain what was inexplicable. It has no place in the modern world, where science has shown how hypotheses can be tested and rejected or accepted on the basis of their success in prediction. The hypothesis has it that God is a spirit and so cannot be tested, but believers in this “spirit” say it is able to effect changes in the material world, and has done in the Creation and prophecy, and still does in answer to prayer. Victor Stenger, in a book everyone should read, shows how science can test for the supposed interventions of God in the world, and shows consclusively that there is no evidence that He does intervene. Either God does not exist or He does not intervene as Christians pray He does.
- Morality and Metaphor 58 kb
Society gives everyone the same rights under the law, and people are to use them instead of taking the law into their own hands—a prescription for social chaos—but they also have the duty to be a good citizen. Failure to do your duty means you are not a good citizen and cannot expect the rights of one. If the law is effective and just, citizens should act altruistically confident that if they are deliberately wronged, the law will deal with it. If they feel slighted, they can rely on justice to satisfy any temptation to feel vengeful. Evil is embodied in our atavistic side, the side that wants to be like a solitary animal, free to do anything. In society we cannot. We have our duty to society. It is what the battle of Good and Evil is about. We have to suppress atavistic behaviour in the social contract we have entered by living in, and enjoying the benefits of, society. When we succeed we are upright, but when we fail we have fallen to the wiles of Satan.
- Sociality and Common Identity in the Evolution of Religion 53 kb
Human sensitivity to social reputation is a psychological mechanism, unrelated to religion, that evolved to facilitate reciprocal co-operative bonds in groups. Selfish people could be accused, punished or excluded from the group. The threat of punishment, particularly exclusion, motivated group members to conform to group behavioral norms. In early human groups, anonymity was impossible, and reducing anonymity in experimental economic games enforces social behavior, as does the presence of images of human eyes. Religions help sociality in large groups, but efficient secular social organization, such as universal education countering superstition, and practical institutions to enforce the law have reduced the need for and conviction behind the upholding of morals by religion. Now, nonreligious people are as likely to report donating to charity as religious ones. Experimentally induced reminders of secular moral authority had as much effect on generous behavior in an economic game as reminders of God.
- Evolutionary Morality, Society and the Golden Rule 55 kb
As we evolved, moral judgments promoted prosocial behavior. They expressed to our ancestors the common judgement of the group of why anyone should act favorably to others in society, even though directly it might be somewhat detrimental to themselves. People had this instinct because those without it had been unable to live in a group. Those with it could, and the group was stronger for it. Moreover, morals are particularly suitable to us because we can speak. The evolution of speech will have enhanced the adoption of spoken moral condemnation and praise, promoting the reciprocation of prosocial behavior to cement human groups.
