Conserving Human Potential Rather Than Civil Religion

 Conserving Human Potential Rather Than Civil Religion

So many conservative writers mimic religion. But perhaps after Abraham, religious doctrine was doomed by the 5,000 year-old, ineluctable-evidence based political-philosophy in Genesis 1:26-28. Two thousand years later, the ancient philosophy was attribued to the-God of changing names (see the Bible). Yet it is metaphysically reasonable to argue that Jesus is its author. In other words, perhaps Jesus was the mysterious author of Genesis 1 philosophy. Or perhaps the physical Jesus agreed with the Genesis 1 recognition of the human individual’s power, energy, and authority (HIPEA) to constrain chaos in their way of living. Recall, apostles reported that Jesus said “Be perfect . . .”. Conservative scholars could . . . should write to preserve the principle that female&male-human-being can&must provide order to the living species and to the earth. Neither Jesus nor government nor any other entity will . . . can . . . usurp HIPEA.

Introduction

Self-described western-scholars miscommunicate what is made plain by human-necessity&justice. Their unarticulated motive is to persuade people in their time to subscribe to political philosophy proposed by the initially Puritan then deist John Locke, died 1704, versus religious impositions from, for example, John Calvin, died 1564, competing with Catholicism and other orthodoxies. This is 2021, and customers can travel into the traditional “heavens”. Civic fellow-citizens are better served by conserving “I don’t know” rather than constructing “we believe”. Thereby, they can maintain an open mind and an open heart to the-ineluctable-truth; “ineluctable” means “not to be avoided, changed, or resisted”.

Since the seventeenth century, humankind develops exponential-discovery and technology compared to research consequences during the preceding 47 centuries. Yet it seems undeniable that each next generation invents beneficial technology that refutes tradition; both physical and psychological traditions. Fear of falling off the edge of the earth repressed exploration for 10 centuries, and today, satellite videos encircling the earth prove it is neither flat nor a disc but like a globe.

For a glimpse of how scholarly attitudes changed since 1800, I tabulated the ngrams (Google scanned-book word-frequencies) and got the following normalized results for 2017 usage relative to “love” frequency in 1807 (please accommodate my omission of word-marks (“word”) hereafter). In 2017, love 90%, rights 49%, sex 22%, justice 20%, responsibility 18.5%, virtue 8%, necessity 7%, integrity 5.5%, chastity 5%, appreciation 4%, honesty 2%, fidelity 1.4%, self-interest 1%, promiscuity 0.2%, and adultery 0%, respectively. Rights, sex, and chastity each more than doubled from 1807 until 2017, chastity to only 5%; virtue, honesty, and fidelity declined by factors of 6, 2, and 5, respectively, while integrity increased by 50%; appreciation increased 20 fold to 4; and self-interest doubled to 1%. Monogamy straight lines at zero%, practically alongside promiscuity and adultery.

It seems that 2017 interest in love, rights, and sex repressed virtue, integrity, chastity, and appreciation; and there’s little writing about honesty, fidelity, and self-interest. I included each necessity, justice, and responsibility to consider my premise. Necessity and justice declined nearly 5 fold and 3 fold, respectively, to 7% and 20% in 2017. Responsibility increased 8 fold to 18.5%. The substantial declines in necessity and justice may reflect an increase in civil-dependency, the recent increase in responsibility is good, but hardly sufficient at 18.5% compared to 90% for love in 2017. It’s hard to imagine love without responsibility and appreciation.

I divide the practices into two groups, the first involving human connections; the second regarding individual self-discipline. Thus, love, rights, sex, virtue, chastity, honesty, promiscuity, and adultery involve at least 2 parties. For example, Jack says he’s in love with Jill, while Jill sincerely avoids Jack’s attention: they are not in a love-connection. And justice, responsibility, necessity, appreciation, and integrity are of self-interest to civic individuals. Jack appreciates Jill without imposition (taking responsibly). In the former practices, each individual shares control and is prudent if they self-discipline human-connections. With civic-citizens practicing necessity&justice, dissidents could observe self-interest to reform to responsible-human-independence.

Critically appreciating a recent conservative article

Mark Hendrickson, in “The Virtue of Chastity”, July 21, 2021, The Epoch Times (https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-virtue-of-chastity_3919147.html), claims Western-scholarly language, perhaps erroneous-Lockean-civil-Christianity, to encourage youth to develop what I view as civic-integrity in self-interest. Hendrickson means well, but civil-religion involves so much hypocrisy that it is not a practical approach beyond metaphysical comfort and hope to adult advocates. The adults are not necessarily practitioners, even if they are members of the clergy, and the youth know it. Also, regarding physics and its progeny --- strong and weak forces, the chemistries, biology, psychology, imagination, and fiction, religion is not a reliable representative. As human-discovery marches, physics corrects metaphysics. I think “Civic-Integrity in Human Intimacy” is more general: it includes dignity and opportunity to almost 400 ova the typical female generates in her fertile years. I hope conservative scholars will consider responsible-human-independence.

Hendrickson quotes Salon, died 560 B.C., who extolled beauty, grace, and peace as self-interests. Salon lived before humans constructed diverse Christian orthodoxies. However, he may have agreed with Jesus before Jesus was born. In a conversation about their father Abraham, the apostles reported that Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born I AM.” That implies that Jesus could have authored or influenced Genesis 1. That’s right:  For all we know, Jesus is the-God of Genesis 1.

The reference to promiscuity entrepreneur Hugh Haefner could have asserted that “self-interest is belittled”. Instead, Hendrickson asks, “What’s in it for you?” to introduce negative and positive consequences.

There’s avoiding pregnancy, STD, and preventing psychological violence. Divorce turns children into victims and lessens the spouses’ financial strength.

Self-interest entails comprehension&intention to behave . . . for the-good. Poor people and politicians share immediate intentions: satisfaction and re-election, respectively. That’s because neither is part of a culture that encourages&facilitates humble-integrity as a human being: instead, they participate in U.S.-unconstitutional “freedom-of-religion”. But the civic-citizen avoids liabilities from treating fellow-citizens as objects. They are unlikely to be gullible to advertisers who promote sexual promiscuity.

Trying to express self-interest as a virtue dilutes the power of human intentions. Females and males who develop intentions to monogamy for life have incentives for “wisdom, character, maturity, and patience”. They are developing “integrity, self-restraint, self-discipline, and self-control” . . . in self-interest as well as mutual trust and commitment.

Self-interest protects the individual from gullibility to self-enslaving practices, such as pornography, promiscuity, mind-changing drugs and alcohol, and gender-choice-enslavement to the entrepreneur’s business plan. The civic-citizen develops responsible-human-independence rather than egocentric freedom&liberty or “God-given rights”. The-God, whatever it may be, will not usurp independence to the human-being, whether civic-fellow citizen or dissident, such as criminal or tyrant.

I hope most religious conservatives will consider the humble-integrity that is needed to develop responsible-human-independence rather than promoting traditional pride: faith in mystery.

Copyright©2021 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included. Edited 1st paragraph 9/10/21.