I don't imagine myself to be anything, but I have spent a decent amount of time trying to sort out the mess that is Christianity & square it with my understanding of the world around me.

Guy & I became a bitcoiners because we figured out that most of the economic ideas we were taught were upside down, we changed the way we eat because we figured out that the dietary recommendations were upside down, it wasn't too difficult to figure out that environmental science is completely upside down too.

It looks to me like the only things that aren't completely backwards or upside down are physical engineering & blue collar sorts of education where everything is much "closer to the metal." If your engineering concepts are totally wrong then your structures fall down.

Would it really be that big of a surprise to find out that everything most Christians believe & most churches teach is completely backwards? Religion is the subject farthest from the metal. All sorts of bad philosophy can persist for a long time without destroying productivity. But there must be some good bones in there somewhere, some living root back to reality for it to all have survived. I think it would be pretty ridiculous to assume we are just the smartest people to ever live & that no one who came before us had any philosophical contribution worth considering. There is generally some nugget of truth in every philsophy, on which the rest of it is built, even if it's mostly trash.

I agree that the Bible is stupid if you read it like a 5 year old. But I also think reading an extremely complicated text full of idioms & methaphor that has been translated from multiple dead languages would be a stupid thing to do. Unpacking what's there is extremely difficult, but it's not impossible. Some things are easier than others, hopefully no one thinks Jesus literally recognized Nathanial by the shade of the tree he sat under, that would make no fucking sense, right? But you can recognize people who understand the world by the way they behave, the people around them, & the way they have set up their lives. In other words, the amount of shade their trees provide. Has a person built a nice life for themselves, or are they stupid, blindly doing what everyone else told them to do & struggling?

I think God is reality. I don't think "all knowledge" can possibly exist outside the system that is the source of all the changing conditions, so the system itself is God. The map is not the territory, only the territory is the territory. Evolution is how God creates life. If we want to be successful & effective in the world around us we have to be married to reality first. If we want to get close to God we have to work to better understand all that is. If we forsake reality in pursuit of delusions the punishment will be harsh. Gravity or chemistry or the laws of economics are all very unforgiving. Whether or not there is some sort of super consciousness attached to reality is kind of irrelevant. If I am completely honest with myself I do sort of act like there is, but I am not sure there is any way to know that with certainty. So think whatever you want to think about praying. There is plenty of evidence to show that meditation & focusing the mind on certain things can help to direct our own subconscious in useful ways.

So if I think God = reality why do I consider myself a Christian... A lot of Christians tell me I am not one of them, which is fine. If by their definitions I have to believe in some sort of magic to be a Christian, then I'm not. But the interesting thing to me is that if you remove all the magic from the story of Jesus, even if he was just someone who became a carpenter after being born into total poverty, to a woman who whored herself out behind her husband's back. He still grew to be someone who completely changed the world. Our calender is literally centered around him. Seems to me that view potentially makes the story more significant, not less.

But if I call myself a Christian then it must be the MOST significant story, right? Well, if you zoom way out & discard the things we can't really know, it looks to me like a story about a man who was tortured by govt & religious authorities for helping others live better lives because his success was a direct threat to people in power who wanted to be the final authority on all things, but they clearly didn't know how to help people the way Jesus did. What always happens when people in power are embarrassed & shown up by a nobody? And of course, the masses in their tendency to blindly go along with authority celebrated the torture of Jesus. But as the story of what had happened to Jesus spread it became obvious that an innocent man was killed for doing good. So the lesson is not to blindly support authority, & not to pursue status & power at the expense of truth, because doing so will destroy all that is good. And if you look at history, look at the last few years, & look around us right now, I can't imagine any message that is more important than that.

And I believe the message at the heart of the story is important enough that no matter how it gets twisted or misinterpreted it can always be resurrected when the need arises. The Bible actually makes it pretty clear that the majority will basically always misunderstand everything. I generally think the deification of Jesus is the result of kings not wanting their power threatened (yes but he was God, who are you?) And plebs also not wanting the responsibility of having to stand up to the king (yes but he was God, who am I?). And I think there is a natural sort of idealization that happens to stories over time, they become larger than life monuments of the things they represented.

Also potentially relevant: it has been said that we die twice, once when life leaves the body, & again the last time anyone says our name. In that sense Jesus lives. It probably was as if he was at every dinner table in the 40 days after his death. If people realized a supposedly just republic had tortured & killed an innocent man & many people had cheered the torture, how might that story spread? And wouldn't the lesson be an important one to remember?