Flowcharting faith-based faith versus faith-obeying-reason
mapping Christian byways of worldbuilding
The crude flowchart, puts into pictorial form the arguments of these posts:
- To build a better world, we should destroy the Catholic Church.
- Fideism the Heresy & Obedience the extra bit about St Augustine of Hippo
- Fideism, reason and the gap that is always there, and
- Sister Wendy on love as an obedient art.
The usage of terms like “worldbuilding” here is the reason this blog exists, i.e. I hope I can more fully explore and explain them.
“Worldbuilding” is what we do most days, it’s one part extended phenotype and one part moral urge. What are we to do with that knowledge is the question of ethics. It is as integral to us as the terrain we move over, seeking nourishment to embody that movement, while seeking the world to landscape that movement. The agency of surviving bodily requires a world be built/made/grown figure/ground for it.
The blue circle labelled “the world” above is inchoate, it is outcome and source. Our choices turn it into our day by day lives. Politics seek to control it.
History is made by those who turn up.
Regardless of whether you obey or believe.
First posted in 2023 at whyweshould.substack.com.
And an extra rant written 3 June 20023.
When they quote their Jesus saying to applicant disciples, weeee — lllllll, you know, you are going to have to leave your families in order to follow me, was this story they told, worldbuilding a world of:
- teenage loss
- ascetic indulgence
- alienation
- early attempt to destroy bourgeois family values
- warrior band formation against the dark angels
- general chaos
- just the basic devotee and their charismatic leader relationship, or,
- all of the above in an undifferentiated mess?
What was the intention, what was the design? Did they convert to anything, or were they just following a personal distinction that made sense at the time? Were they just living a practice with rebellious undertones?
St Augustine’s City of God came much later, between Constantine and Vespasian, after the Goths sacked Rome. Christianity was now the chosen state religion and on the verge of becoming an exclusive government department of community engagement and control, and not just a royal/imperial house cult. The city of god was a world-building exercise drawing on past practices and then contemporary imperial matters of state. That is why the Catholic & Orthodox Churches are structured like military hierarchies. And why obedience is more important than belief, and loyalty more important than identity.
More widely it was a worldbuilding exercise based on re-couping the ancient polis with it’s local concerns, it’s parochial view of who is human, and replacing that with a vision of a universal church of obedient souls, i.e. as a new imperial polis that applied to everyone, as the glory of Rome. (Still a city social-tech company though. Church as an update over cultic-sites that now send metadata and telemetry back to the base in Rome.)
Christians now are devotees who obeyed the church and who do not choose choice (heresy) over obedience. Faith in faith, belief in belief, in a relationship directly with Jesus was not good enough. Especially as the empire collapses and loyalty of young fighting men becomes paramount in create the feudal medieval order in the west out of pagan barbarian invaders.
Curious how important women and families (a grouping which includes the household slaves) are in spreading Christianity before this imperial outcome.
So confounded.
Did the first disciples, the first bikies of christ, choose all that in leaving their families to follow and become his devotees? Unlikely.
What would they think of the pope in Rome, or Luther with his nails?
Above is a flow chart of this Christian story re-framed within a wordlbuilding worldview, i.e. drawn consciously as a description of worldbuilding.
Religions are created by the state in their image. You may think Christianity is better because it gives everyone souls, or recognises that everyone has souls? I.e. a sort of proto-Humanism: all are welcome in the city of god? All have individual rights (as it is later interpreted) as humans in the city of god? Yeah but nah, maybe later, as this only gives you the responsibility to obey the church and emperor. Or its zombie descendant organisations. It creared feudalism not liberalism, deliberately so.
